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All the King^s Men

ROBERT PENN WARREN

Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.
La Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, m

New fork

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

L.7.56

PRINTEB IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

JUSTINE AND DAVID MITCHELL CLAY

ALL THE KING’S MEN

Chapter One

MASON CITY.

To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out o£ the
city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we
went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles,
coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and
at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the
slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the
black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and
if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep
breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hyp-
*notize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the
right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the
slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the
slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn oflE
the ignition just as she starts the dive. But you won’t make it, of
course. Then a nigger chopping cotton a mile away, he’ll look up
and see the little column of black smoke standing up above the
vitriolic, arsenical green of the cotton rows, and up against the
violent, metallic, throbbing blue of the sky, and he’ll say, “Lawd
God, hit’s a-nudder one done done hitl” And the next nigger
down the next row, he’ll say, “Lawd God,” and the first nigger will
giggle, and the hoe will lift again and the blade will flash in the
sun like a heliograph. Then a few days later the boys from the
Highway Department will mark the spot with a little metal square
on a metal rod stuck in the black dirt ofiE the shoulder, the metal
square painted white and on it in black a skull and crossbones.
Later on love vine will climb up it, out of the weeds.

But if you wake up in time and don’t hook your wheel ofiE the
slab, you’ll go whipping on into the dazzle and now and then a car
will come at you steady out of the dazzle and will pass you with a
snatching sound as though God-Almighty had ripped a tin roof
loose with his hare hands. Way off ahead of you, at the horizon

3 ,

where the cotton fields are blurred into the light, the slab will glit-
ter and gleam like water, as though the road were flooded. You'll
go whipping toward it, but it will always be ahead of you, that
bright, flooded place, like a mirage. You’ll go past the little white
metal squares set on metal rods, with the skull and crossbones on
them to mark the spot. For this is the country where the age of the
internal combustion engine has come into its own. Where every
boy is Barney Oldfield, and the girls wear organdy and batiste and
eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate and
have smooth little faces to break your heart and when the wind of
the car’s speed lifts up their hair at the temples you see the sweet
little beads of perspiration nestling there, and they sit low in the
seat with their little spines crooked and their bent knees high
toward the dashboard and not too close together for the cool, if you
could call it that, from the hood ventilator. Where the smell of
gasoline and burning brake bands and red-eye is sweeter than
myrrii. Where the eight-cylinder jobs come roaring round the curves
in the red hills and scatter the gravel like spray, and when they
ever get down in the flat country and hit the new slab, God have
mercy on the mariner.

On up Number 58, and the country breaks. The flat country and
the big cotton fields are gone now, and the grove of live oaks way
off yonder where the big house is, and the whitewashed shacks, all
just alike, set in a row by the cotton fields with the cotton growing
up to the doorstep, where the pickaninny sits like a black Billiken
and sucks its thumb and watches you go by. That's all left behind
now. It is red hills now, not high, with blackberry bushes along
the fence rows, and blackjack clumps in the bottoms and now and
then a place where the second-growth pines stand close together if
they haven’t burned over for sheep grass, and if they have burned
over, there are the black stubs. The cotton patches cling to the hill-
sides, and the gullies cut across the cotton patches. The corn blades
hang stiff and are streaked with yellow.

There were pine forests here a long time ago but they are gone.
The bastards got in here and set up the mills and laid the narrow-
gauge tracks and knocked together the company commissaries and
paid a dollar a day and folks swarmed out of the brush for the
dollar and folks came from God knows where, riding in wagons
with a chest of drawers and a bedstead canted together in the wagon
bed, and five kids huddled down together and the old woman
hunched on the wagon seat with a poke bonnet on her head and
snuff on her gums and a young one hanging on her tit. The saws
sang soprano and the clerk in the commissary passed out the blacks

strap molasses and the sow-belly and wrote in his big book, and
the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness collaborated to heal
the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife, and all was merry as
a marriage bell. Till, all of a sudden, there weren’t any more pine
trees. They stripped the mills. The narrow-gauge tracks got covered
with grass. Folks tore down the commissaries for kindling wood.
There wasn’t any more dollar a day. The big boys were gone, with
diamond rings on their fingers and broadcloth on their backs. But
a good many of the folks stayed right on, and watched the gullies
eat deeper into the red clay. And a good handful of those folks and
their heirs and assigns stayed in Mason City, four thousand of them,
more or less.

You come in on Number 58, and pass the cotton gin and the
power station and the fringe of nigger shacks and bump across the
railroad track and down a street where there are a lot of little
houses painted white one time, with the sad valentine lace of
gingerbread work around the eaves of the veranda, and tin ^^oofs,
and where the leaves on the trees in the yards hang straight down in
the heat, and above the mannerly whisper of your eighty-horse-
power valve-in-head (or whatever it is) drifting at forty, you hear
tire July flies grinding away in the verdure.

That was the way it was the last time I saw Mason City, nearly
three years ago, back in the summer of 1936. I was in the first car,
the Cadillac, with the Boss and Mr. Duffy and the Boss’s wife and
son and Sugar-Boy. In the second car, which lacked our quiet ele-
gance reminiscent of a cross between a hearse and an ocean liner
but which still wouldn’t make your cheeks burn witli shame in the
country-club parking lot, there were some reporters and a photogra-
pher and Sadie Burke, the Boss’s secretary, to see they got there
sober enough to do what they were supposed to do.

Sugar-Boy was driving the Cadillac, and it was a pleasure to
watch him. Or it would have been if you could detach your imagi-
nation from the picture of what near a couple of tons of expensive
mechanism looks like after it’s turned turtle three times at eighty
and could give your undivided attention to the exhibition of mus-
cular co-ordination, satanic humor, and split-second timing which
was Sugar-Boy’s when he whipped around a hay wagon in the face
of an oncoming gasoline truck and went through the rapidly dimim
ishing aperture close enough to give the truck driver heart failure
with one rear fender and wipe the snot off a mule’s nose with the
other. But the Boss loved it. He always sat up front with Sugar-Boy
and looked at the speedometer and down the road and grinned to
Sugar-Boy after they got tlirough between the mule’s nose and tht

gasoline truck. And Sugar-Boy’s head would twitch, the way it al-
ways did when the words were piling up inside of him and couldn’t
get out, and then he'd start. “The b-b-b-b-b— ” he would manage to
get out and the saliva would spray from his lips like Flit from a
Flit gun. “The b-b-b-b-bas-tud— he seen me c-c-c~’’ and here he’d
spray the inside of the windshield-”“c-c-com-ing.’' Sugar-Boy couldn’t
talk, but he could express himself when he got his foot on the accel-
erator. He wouldn't win any debating contests in high school, but
then nobody would ever want to debate with Sugar-Boy. Not any-
body who knew him and had seen him do tricks with the .38 Special
which rode under his left armpit like a tumor.

No doubt you thought Sugar-Boy was a Negro, from his name.
But he wasn’t. He was Irish, from the wrong side of the tracks. He
was about five-feet-two, and he was getting bald, though he wasn’t
more than twenty-seven or -eight years old, and he wore red ties
and under the red tie and his shirt he wore a little Papist medal on
a chain, and I always hoped to God it was St. Christopher and that
St. Christopher was on the job. His name was O’Sheean, but they
called him Sugar-Boy because he ate sugar. Every time he went to a
restaurant he took all the cube sugar there was in the bowl. He
went around with his pockets stujffed with sugar cubes, and when he
took one out to pop into his mouth you saw little pieces of gray lint
sticking to it, the kind of lint there always is loose in your pocket,
and shreds of tobacco from cigarettes. He’d pop the cube in over
the barricade of his twisted black little teeth, and then you’d see
the thin little mystic Irish cheeks cave in as he sucked the sugar,
so that he looked like an undernourished leprechaun.

The Boss was sitting in the front seat with Sugar-Boy and watch-
ing the speedometer, with his kid Tom up there with him. Tom was
then about eighteen or nineteen—I forgot which—but you would
have thought he was older. He wasn’t so big, but he was built like
a man and his head sat on his shoulders like a man’s head without
that gangly, craning look a kid’s head has. He had been a high-
school football hero and the fall before he had been the flashiest
thing on the freshman team at State. He got his name in the papers
because he was really good. He knew he was good. He knew he was
the nuts, as you could tell from one look at his slick-skinned hand-
soipe brown face, with the jawbone working insolently and slow
over a little piece of chewing gum and his blue eyes under half-
lowered lids working insolently and slow over you, or tlie whole
damned world. But that day when he was up in the front seat with
Willie Stark, who was tlie Boss, I couldn’t see his face, I remem-
" -6

bered thinking his head, the shape and the way it was set on his
shoulders, was just like his old man*s head.

Mrs. Stark— Lucy Stark, the wife of the Boss— Tiny DaflFy, and I
were in the back seat— Lucy Stark between Tiny and me. It wasn't
exactly a gay little gathering. The temperature didn't make for chit-
chat in the first place. In the second place, I was watching out for
the hay wagons and gasoline trucks. In the third place, Duffy and
Lucy Stark never were exactly chummy. So she sat between Duffy
and me and gave herself to her thoughts. I reckon she had plenty to
think about. For one thing, she could think about all that had
happened since she was a girl teaching her first year in the school at
Mason City and had married a red-faced and red-necked farm boy
with big slow hands and a shock of dark brown hair coming down,
over his brow (you can look at the wedding picture which has been
in the papers along with a thousand other pictures of Willie) and a
look of dog-like devotion and wonder in his eyes when they fixed
on her. She would have had a lot to think about as she sat in the
hurtling Cadillac, for there had been a lot of changes.

We tooled down the street where the little one-time-white houses
were, and hit the square. It was Saturday afternoon and the square
was full of folks. The wagons and the crates were parked solid
around the patch of grass roots in the middle of which stood the
courthouse, a red-brick box, well weathered and needing paint, for
it had been there since before the Civil War, with a little tower with
a clock face on each side. On the second look you discovered that
the clock faces weren't real. They were just painted on, and they
all said five o'clock and not eight-seventeen the way those big
painted watches in front of third-string jewelry stores used to. We
eased into the ruck of folks come in to do their trading, and Sugar-
Boy leaned on his horn, and his head twitched, and he said,
'‘B-b-b-b-as-tuds," and the spit flew.

We pulled up in front of the drugstore, and the kid Tom got out
and then the Boss, before Sugar-Boy could get around to the door.
I got out and helped out Lucy Stark, who came up from the depths
of heat and meditation long enough to say, “Thaiik you.” She stood
there on the pavement a second, touching her skirt into place
around her hips, which had a little more beam on them than no
doubt had been the case when she won the heart of Willie Stark,
the farm boy.

Mr, Duffy debouched massively from the Cadillac, and we all
entered the drugstore, the Boss holding the door open so Lucy Stark
could go in and then following her, and the rest of us trailing in.
There were a good many folks in the store> men in overalls lined

^ ^ ' 1

up along the soda fountain, and women hanging around the coun-
ters where the Junk and glory was, and kids hanging on skirts with
one hand and clutching ice-cream cones with the other and staring
out over their own wet noses at the world of men from eyes which
resembled painted china marbles. The Boss just stood modestly
back of the gang of customers at the soda fountain, with his hat in
his hand and the damp hair hanging down over his forehead. He
stood that way a minute maybe, and then one of the girls ladling
up ice cream happened to see him, and got a look on her face as
though her garter belt had busted in church, and dropped her ice-
cream scoop, and headed for the back of the store with her hips
pumping hell-for-leather under the lettuce-green smock.

Then a- second later a little bald-headed fellow wearing a white
coat whicn ought to have been in the week’s wash came plunging
through the crowd from the back of the store, waving his hand
and bumping the customers and yelling, “It’s Willie!’’ The fellow
ran up to the Boss, and the Boss took a couple of steps to meet him,
and the fellow with the white coat grabbed Willie’s hand as though
he were drowning. He didn’t shake Willie’s hand, not by ordinary
standards. He just hung on to it and twitched all over and gargled
tire sacred syllables of Willie. Then, when the attack had passed,
he turned to the crowd, which was ringing around at a polite dis-
tance and staring, and announced, “My God, folks, it’s Willie!”

The remark was superfluous. One look at the faces rallied around
and you knew that if any citizen over the age of three didn’t know
that the strong-set man standing there in the Palm Beach suit was
Willie Stark, that citizen was a half-wit. In the first place, all he
would have to do would be to lift his eyes to the big picture high
up there above the soda fountain, a picture about six times life
size, which showed the same face, the big eyes, which in the picture
had the suggestion of a sleepy and inward look (the eyes of the man
in the Palm Beach suit didn’t have that look now, but I’ve seen it),
the pouches under the eyes and the jowls beginning to sag off, and
the meaty lips, which didn’t sag but if you looked close were laid
one on top of the other like a couple of bricks, and the tousle of
hair hanging down on the not very high squarish forehead. Under
the picture was the legend; My study is the heart of the people. In
quotation marks, and signed, Willie Stark. I had seen that picture
in a thousand places, pool halls to palaces.

Somebody back in the crowd yelled, “Hi, Willie!” The Boss lifted
his right hand and waved in acknowledgment to the unknown ad-
mirer. Then the Boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda foun-
tain, a tall, gaunt-shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked

venison, wearing jean pants and a brace of mustaches hanging ofi
the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalry-
men, and the Boss started toward him and put out his hand. Old
Leather- Face didn’t show. Maybe he shuffled one of his broken bro-
gans on the tiles, and his Adam’s apple jerked one or twice, and the
eyes were watchful out of that face which resembled the seat of an
old saddle left out in the weather, but when the Boss got close, his
hand came up from the elbow, as though it didn't belong to Old
Leather-Face but was operating on its own, and the Boss took it.

“How you making it, Malaciah?” the Boss asked.

The Adam’s apple worked a couple of times, and the Boss shook
the hand which was hanging out there in the air as if it didn’t
belong to anybody, and Old Leather-Face said, “We's grabblen."

“How's your boy?” the Boss asked.

“Ain’t doen so good,” Old Leather-Face allowed.

“Sick?”

“Naw,” Old Leather-Face allowed, “jail.”

“My God,” the Boss said, “what they doing round here, putting
good boys in jail?”

“He’s a good boy,” Old Leather-Face allowed. “Hit wuz a fahr
fight, but he had a leetle bad luck.”

“Huh?”

“Hit wuz fahr and squahr, but he had a leetle bad luck. He
stobbed the feller and he died.”

“Tough tiddy,” the Boss said. Then: “Tried yet?”

“Not yit.”

“Tough tiddy,” the Boss said.

“I ain't complainen,” Old Leather-Face said. “Hit wuz fit fahr
and squahr.”

“Glad to seen you,” the Boss said. “Tell your boy to keep his tail
over the dashboard.”

“He ain't complainen,” Old Leather-Face said.

The Boss started to turn away to the rest of us who after a hun-
dred miles in the dazzle were looking at that soda fountain as
though it were a mirage, but Old Leather-Face said, “Willie.”

“Huh?” the Boss answered.

“Yore pitcher,” Old Leather-Face allowed, and jerked his head
aeakily toward the six-times-life-size photograph over the soda
fountain. “Yore pitcher,” he said, “hit don't do you no credit,
Willie.”

“Hell, no,” the Boss said, studying the picture, cocking his head
to one side and squinting at it, “but I was porely when they took
it. I was like I'd had the cholera morbus. Get in there busting some

sense into that Legislature, and it leaves a man worse'n the summer
complaint/’

“Git in thar and bust ’em, Williel” somebody yelled from back
in the crowd, which was thickening out now, for folks were trying
to get in from the street.

“I’ll bust ’em,” Willie said, and turned around to the little man
with the white coat. “Give us some cokes, Doc,” he said, “for God’s
sake.”

It looked as if Doc would have heart failure getting around to
the other side of the soda fountain. The tail of that white coat was
jlat on the air behind him when he switched the corner and started
clawing past the couple of girls in the lettuce-green smocks so he
could do the drawing. He got the first one set up, and passed it to
the Boss, who handed it to his wife. Then he started drawing the
next one, and kept on saying, “It’s on the house, Willie, it’s on the
house.” The Boss took that one himself, and Doc kept on drawing
them and saying, “It's on the house, Willie, it’s on the house.” He
kept on drawing them till he got about five too many.

By that time folks were packed outside the door solid to the
middle of the street. Faces were pressed up against the screen door,
the way you do when you try to see through a screen into a dim
room. Outside, they kept yelling, “Speech, Willie, speech!”

“My God,” the Boss said, in the direction of Doc, who was hang-
ing on to one of the nickel-plated spouts of the fountain and watch-
ing every drop of the coke go down the Boss’s gullet. “My God,”
the Boss said, “I didn’t come here to make a speech. I came here to
go out and see my pappy.”

“Speech, Willie, speech!” they were yelling out there.

The Boss set his little glass on the marble.

“It’s on the house,” Doc uttered croakingly with what strength
was left in him after the rapture.

“Thanks, Doc,” the Boss said. He turned away to head toward
the door, then looked back. “You better get back in here and sell
a lot of aspirin, Doc,” he said, “to make up for the charity.”

Then he plowed out the door, and the crowd fell back, and we
tailed after him.

Mr. Duffy stepped up beside the Boss and asked him was he
going to make a speech, but the Boss didn’t even look at him. He
kept walking slow and steady right on across the street into the
crowd, as though the crowd hadn’t been there. The red, long faces
with the eyes in them watching like something wary and wild and
watchful in a thicket fell back, and there wasn’t a sound. The crowd
creamed back from his passage, and we followed in his wake, all

of US WHO had been in the Cadillac, and the others who had been in
the second car. Then the crowd closed behind.

The Boss kept walking straight ahead, his head bowed a little,
the way a man bows his head when he is out walking by himself
and has something on his mind. His hair fell down over his fore-
head, for he was carrying his hat in his hand. I knew his hair was
down over his forehead, for I saw him give his head a quick jerk
once or twice, the way he always did when he was walking alone
and it fell down toward his eyes, the kind of motion a horse gives
just after the bit is in and he’s full of beans.

He walked straight across the street and across the patch of grass
roots and up the steps of the courthouse. Nobody else followed him
up the steps. At the top he turned around, slow, to face the crowd.
He simply looked at them, blinking his big eyes a little, just as
though he had just stepped out of the open doors and the dark hall
of the courthouse behind him and was blinking to get his eyes
adjusted to the light. He stood up there blinking, the hair down on
his forehead, and the dark sweat patch showing under each arm of
his Palm Beach coat. Then he gave his head a twitch, and his eyes
bulged wide suddenly, even if the light was hitting him full in the
face, and you could see the glitter in them.

It's coming, I thought.

You saw the eyes bulge suddenly like that, as though something
had happened inside him, and there was that glitter. You knew
something had happened inside him, and thought: lt*s coming. It
was always that way. There was the bulge and the glitter, and there
was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though some-
body had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you,
with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove. It was like the second
when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of
the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and
pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand
there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there's
an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles
and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and
vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark
which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you
carry aroiind inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope,
and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too.
But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the
dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are
blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to knoW
What is in that envelop^. It wants to lie in the dark and not know,

' ' IT ' '

and be warm in its not-knowing. The end of man is knowledge,
but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether
knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right,
but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge
which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got
and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your
stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope,
for the end of man is to know.

The Boss stood up there quiet, with the bulge and glitter in the
eyes, and there wasn’t a sound in the crowd. You could hear one
insane and irrelevant July fly sawing away up in one of the catalpa
trees in the square. Then that sound stopped, and there wasn’t any-
thing but tlie waiting. Then the Boss lounged a step forward, easy
and soft-footed.

‘I’m not going to make any speech,” the Boss said, and grinned.
But the eyes were still big and the glitter was in them. “I didn’t
come here to make any speech. I came up here to go out and see
my pappy, and see if he’s got anything left in the smokehouse fit to
eat. I’m gonna say: Pappy, now what about all that smoked sausage
you wuz bragging about, what about all that ham you wuz brag-
ging about all last winter, what about—” That's what he was say-
ing, but the voice was different, going up in his nose and coming
out flat with that little break they’ve got in the red hills, saying,
”Pappy, now what about—”

But the glitter was still there, and I thought: Maybe it's coming.
Maybe it was not too late. You never could tell. Suddenly, it might
be there, he might say it.

But he was saying, and so I’m not going to make any speech—”
In his old voice, his own voice. Or was that his voice? Which was
his true voice, which one of all the voices, you would wonder.

He was saying, “And I didn’t come here to ask you to give me
anything, not even a vote. The Good Book says, ‘There are three
things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, it is
enough—’ ” and the voice was different now— “ ‘the grave, and the
barren womb, the earth that is not filled with water, and the fire
that saith not, it is enough.’ But Solomon might have added just
one little item. He might have just made his little list complete,
and added, the politician who never stops saying, Gimme.”

He was lounging back on himself now, and his head was cocked
a little to one side, and his eyes blinked. Then he grinned, and said,
“If they had politicians back in those days, they said, Gimme, just
like all of us politicians do. Gimme, gimme, my name’s Jimmie.
But Vm not a politician today. Tm taking the day off. I’m not even

going to ask you to vote for me. To tell the God’s unvarnished and
unbuckled truth, I don’t have to ask you. Not today. I still got
quite a little hitch up there in the big house with the white columns
two stories high on the front porch and peach ice cream for break-
fast. Not that a passel of those statesmen wouldn’t like to throw me
out. You know—” and he leaned forward a little now, as if to tell
them a secret— “it’s funny how I just can’t make friends with some
folks. No matter how hard I try. I been just as polite, I said, Please.
But please didn’t do any good. But it looks like they got to put up
with me a spell longer. And you have. Before you get shet of me. So
you better just grin and bear it. It’s not any worse’n boils. Now,
is it?”

He stopped, and looked all around, right down at them, moving
his head slow, so that he seemed to look right in a face here and
stop for just a split second, and then to move on to another one a
little farther. Then he grinned, and his eyes blinked, and he said,
“Huh? What’s the matter? Cat got yore tongue?”

“Boils on the taill” somebody yelled back in the crowd.

“Dammit,” Willie yelled right back, “lie on yore stummick and
go to sleepi”

Somebody laughed.

“And,” yelled Willie, “thank the gooa Lord who in his everlast-
ing mercy saw fit to make something with a back side and a front
side to it out of the skimpy little piece of material provided in
your case!”

“You tell 'em, Willie!” somebody yelled back in the crowd. Then
they started to laugh.

The Boss lifted up his right hand about as high as his head, out
in front of him, palm down, and waited till they stopped laughing
and whistling. Then he said: “No, I’m not here to ask you for any-
thing. A vote or anything else. I reckon I’ll be back later for that.
If I keep on relishing that peach ice cream for breakfast in the
big house. But I don’t expect all of you to vote for me. My God,
if all of you went and voted for Willie, what the hell would you
find to argue about? There wouldn’t be anything left but the
weather, and you can’t vote on that.

“No,” he said, and it was another voice, quiet and easy and com-
ing slow and from a distance, “I’m not here to ask for anything
today. I’m taking the day off, and I’ve come home. A man goes
away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange
beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in
the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are
ho names for the faces. The voices he hears are not the voices he

carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The
voices ne hears are loud. They are so loud he does not hear for a
long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. But
there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices
he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what
they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So
he comes back.”

His voice just stopped. It didn’t trail off like a voice coming to
a stop. One second it was there, going on, word by word, in the
stillness which filled the square and the crowd in front of the court-
house and was stiller for the grinding of the July flies in the two
catalpas rising above the heads of the people who had crowded up
on the patch of grass roots. The voice was going there, word by
word, then suddenly it was not there. There was only the sound of
the July flies, whicli seems to be inside your head as though it
were the grind and whir of the springs and cogs which are you and
which will not stop no matter what you say until they are good
and ready.

He stood there a half minute, not saying a word, and not moving.
He didn’t even seem to be noticing the crowd down there. Then he
seemed, all at once, to discover them, and grinned. “So he comes
back,” he said, grinning now. “When he gets half a day off. And he
says, Hello, folks, how you making it? And that’s what I’m saying.”

That’s what he said. He looked down, grinning, and his head
turned as his eyes went down in the crowd, and seemed to stop on
a face there, and then go on to stop on another face.

Then he started walking down the steps, as if he had just come
out of that dusky-dark hallway beyond the big open doors behind
him and was walking down the steps by himself, with nobody there
in front of him and no eyes on him. He came straight down the steps
toward where his gang was standing, Lucy Stark and tiie rest of us,
and nodded at us as though he were simply passing us on the street
and didn't know us any too well anyway, and kept right on walk-
ing, straight into the crowd as though the crowd weren’t there. The
people fell back a little to make a passage for him, with their eyes
looking right at him, and the rest of us in his gang followed behind
him, and the crowd closed up behind us.

People were clapping now, and yelling. Somebody kept yelling,
“Hi, Williel”

The Boss walked straight across the street, through the crowd,
and got into the Cadillac and sat down. We got in with him and
the photographer and the others went back to their car. Sugar-Boy
started up and nosed out into the street. People didn’t get out of

•the way very fast. They couldn’t, they were so jammed in. When
we nosed out into the crowd, the faces were right there outside the
car, not more than a foot or so away. The faces looked right in at
us. But they were out there and we were inside now. The eyes in
the red, slick-skinned long faces, or the brown, crinkled faces,
looked in at us.

Sugar-Boy kept pecking at his horn. The words were piling up
inside him. His lips started to work. I could see his face in the
driver’s mirror, and the lips were working. ‘The b-b-b-b-as-tuds,”
he said, and the spit flew.

The Boss had sunk in on himself now.

“The b-b-b-b-as-tuds,’’ Sugar-Boy said, and pecked at his horn,
but we were easing out of the square now to a side street where
there weren’t any people. We were doing forty by the time we
passed the brick schoolhouse on the outskirts of town. Seeing the
schoolhouse made me remember how I had first met Willie, about
fourteen years before, back in 1922, when he wasn’t anything but
the County Treasurer of Mason County and had come down to the
city to see about the bond issue to build that schoolhouse. Then 1
remembered how I had met him, in the back room of Slade’s pool
hall, where Slade sold the needle beer, and we were sitting at one of
those little marble-topped tables with wirework legs, the kind they
used to have in drugstores when you were a boy and took your high-
school sweetie down on Saturday night to get that chocolate banana
split and rub knees under the table and the wirework would always
get in the way.

There were four of us. There was Tiny Duffy, who was almost
as big back then as he was to get to be. He didn’t need any sign to
let you know what he was. If the wind was right, you knew he was
a city-hall slob long before you could see the whites of his eyes. He
had the belly and he sweated through his shirt just above the belt
buckle, and he had the face, which was creamed and curded like a
cow patty in a spring pasture, only it was the color of biscuit dough,
and in the middle was his grin with the gold teeth. He was Tax
Assessor, and he wore a flat hard straw hat on the back of his head.
There was a striped band on the hat.

Then there was Alex Michel, who was a country boy from up in
Mason County but who was learning fast He had learned fast
enough to get to be a deputy sheriff. But he wasn’t that long. He
wasn’t anything, for he got cut in the gut by a coke-frisky piano
player in a cribhouse where he had gone to take out a little in trade
on his protection account. Alex was, as I have said^ from up in
Mason County.

Duffy and I had been in the back room o£ Slade's place waiting
for Alex, with whom I had the hope of transacting a little business.
I was a newspaperman and Alex knew something I wanted to
know. Duffy had called him in, for Duffy was a friend of mine. At
least, he knew that I worked for the Chronicle , which at that time
was supporting the Joe Harrison outfit. Joe Harrison was Governor
then. And Duffy was one of Joe Harrison's boys.

So I was sitting in the back room of Slade's place, one hot morn-
ing in June or July, back in 1922, waiting for Alex Michel to turn
up and listening to the silence in the back room of Slade’s place.
A funeral parlor at midnight is ear-splitting compared to the effect
you get in the middle of the morning in the back room of a place
like Slade's if you are the first man there. You sit there and think
how cozy it was last night, with the effluvium of brotherly bodies
and the haw-haw of camaraderie, and you look at the floor where
now there are little parallel trails of damp sawdust the old broom
left this morning when the unenthusiastic old Negro man cleaned
up, and the general impression is that you are alone with the Alone
and it is His move. So I sat there in the silence (Duffy was never
talkative in the morning before he had worried down two or three
drinks), and listened to my tissues break down and the beads of
perspiration explode delicately out of the ducts embedded in the
ample flesh of my companion.

Alex came in with a fellow with him, and I knew my little con-
versation was not promising. My mission was of some delicacy, not
fit for the ear of a stranger. I figured that might be the reason Alex
had his friend in tow. Maybe it was, for Alex was cagey in an ama-
teurish sort of way. In any case, he had the Boss with him.

Only it was not the Boss. Not to the crude eye of the homme
sensueL Metaphysically it was the Boss, but how was I to know?
Fate comes walking through the door, and it is five feet eleven inches
tall and heavyish in the chest and shortish in the leg and is wearing
a seven-fifty seersucker suit which is too long in the pants so the
cuffs crumple down over the high black shoes, which could do with
a polishing, and a stiff high collar like a Sunday-school superin-
tendent and a blue-stiiped tie which you know his wife gave him
last Christmas and which he has kept in tissue paper with the
holly card (“Merry Xmas to my Darling Willie from your Loving
Wife”) until he got ready to go up to the city, and a gray felt hat
with the sweat stains showing through the band. It comes in just
like that, and how are you to know? It comes in, trailing behind
Alex Michel, who is, or was before the piano player got him, six-
feet-two of beautifully articulated bone and gristle with a hard,

bony, baked-looking face and two little quick brown eyes which
don’t belong above that classic torso and in that face and which
keep fidgeting around like a brace of Mexican jumping beans. So
Fate trails modestly along behind Alex Michel, who approaches the
table with an air of command which would deceive no one.

Alex shook my hand and said, *'Hi, pal,” and slapped me on the
shoulder with a palm that was tough enough to crack a black wal-
nut, and paid proper obeisance to Mr. Duffy, who extended a hand
without rising; and then, as a sort of afterthought, Alex jerked a
thumb toward his trailing companion and said, “This is Willie
Stark, gents. From up home at Mason City. Me and Willie was m
school together. Yeah, and Willie, he was a bookworm, he was
teacher’s pet. Wuzn’t you, Willie?” And Alex whickered like a stal-
lion in full appreciation of his own delicious humor and nudged
the teacher’s pet in the ribs. Then, controlling himself, he added,
“And he’s still teacher’s pet, ain’t you, Willie, ain’t you?”

And he turned to Duffy and me, and explained, before mirth
again took him and Slade’s back room again resounded with the
cheerful note of the breeding paddock, “Willie— Willie— he married
a school-teacher!”

That idea seemed monstrously funny to Alex. Meanwhile, Willie,
unable to complete the amenities of the situation, bowed to the
blast and stood there with the old gray felt hat in his hand, with
the sweat showing around the band outside where it had soaked
through. Willie’s large face, above the stiff country collar, didn’t
show a thing.

“Yeah— yeah— he married a school-teacher!” Alex reaffirmed with
undiminished relish.

“Well,” said Mr. Duffy, whose experience and tact were equal to
any situation, “they tells me school-teachers are made with it in the
same place.” Mr. Duffy lifted his lip to expose the gold, but made
no sound, for, Mr. Duffy being a man of the world and serene in
confidence, his style was to put forth his sally and let it make its
way on its intrinsic worth and to leave the applause to the public.

Alex provided the applause in good measure. I contributed only
a grin which felt sickly on my face, and Willie was a blank.

“Gawd!” Alex managed, when breath had returned to him,
“Gawd, Mr. Duffy, you are a card! You shore-Gawd are.” And again
he vigorously nudged the teacher’s pet in the ribs to spur his lag-
gard humor. When he got no result, he nudged again, and de-
manded flatly of his ward; “Now ain’t Mr. Duffy a card?”

“Yes,” Willie replied, looking at Mr, Duffy innocently, judicially,
dispassionately. “Yes,” he said, “Mr, Duffy is a card.” And as the

admission was made, albeit belatedly and with some ambiguity o£
inflection, the slight cloud which had gathered upon Mr. Duffy's
brow was dissipated with no trace o£ rancor left behind.

Willie took advantage of the momentary lull to wind up the rit-
ual of introduction which Alex's high spirits had interrupted. He
transferred his old gray hat to his left hand and took the two steps
necessary to bring him to the table, and gi'avely extended his hand
to me. So much water had flowed beneath the bridges since Alex
had jerked his thumb toward the stranger from the country and
said, “This is Willie Stark," that I had almost forgotten I hadn't
known Willie all my life. So I didn’t catch on right away that he
was out to shake hands. I must have looked at his outstretched hand
inquiringly and then given him a blank look, and he just showed
me his dead pan—it was just another pan, at first glance anyway—
and kept on holding his hand out. Then I came to, and not to be
outdone in courtesy of the old school, I hitched my chair back from
the table and almost stood all the way up, and groped for his hand.
It was a pretty good-sized hand. Wiien you first took it you figured
it was on the soft side, and the palm a little too moist— which is
something, however, you don't hold against a man in certain lati-
tudes—then you discovered it had a solid substructure. It was like
the hand of a farm boy who has not too recently given up the plow
for a job in the crossroads store. Willie’s hand gave mine three dec-
orous pump-handle motions, and he said, “Glad to meetcha, Mr.
Burden," like something he had memorized, and then, I could have
sworn, he gave me a wink. Then looking into that dead pan, I
wasn’t sure. About twelve years later, at a time when the problem of
Willie's personality more imperiously occupied my rare hours of
speculation, I asked him, “Boss, do you remember the time we first
got acquainted in the back room of Slade’s joint?"

He said he did, which wasn’t remarkable, for he was like the
circus elephant, he never forgot anything, the fellow who gave him
the peanut or the fellow ^who put snuff in his trunk.

“You remember when we shook hands?" I asked him.

“Yeah," he said.

“Well, Boss," I demanded, “did you or didn’t you wink at me?"

“Boy—" he said and toyed with his glass of Scotch and soda and
dug the heel of one of his unpolished, thirty-dollar, chastely de-
signed bench-made shoes into the best bed-spread the St. Regis
Hotel could afford. “Boy,” he said, and smiled at me paternally
over his glass, “that is a mystery."

“Don’t you remember?’^ I said.

“Sure,’Vhe said, “I remember."

‘‘Well?” I demanded.

“Suppose I just had something in my eye?” he said.

“Well, damn it, you just had something in your eye then.”

“Suppose I didn’t have anything in my eye?”

“Then maybe you winked because you figured you and me had
some views in common about the tone of the gathering.”

“Maybe,” he said. “It ain’t any secret that my old schoolmate
Alex was a heel. And it ain’t any secret that Tiny Duffy is as
sebaceous a fat-ass as ever made the spring groan in a swivel chair.”

“He is an s.o.b.,” I affirmed.

“He is,” the Boss agreed cheerfully, “but he is a useful citizen.
If you know what to do with him.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and I suppose you think you know what to do
with him. You made him Lieutenant Governor.” (For that was in
the Boss’s last term when Tiny was his understudy.)

“Sure,” the Boss nodded, “somebody’s got to be Lieutenant Gov-
ernor.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Tiny Duffy.”

“Sure,” he said, “Tiny Duffy. The beauty about Tiny is that
nobody can trust him and you know it. You get somebody some-
body can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying
whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a
night’s sleep. All you got to do is keep the albumen scared out of
his urine.”

“Boss, did you wink at me that time back at Slade’s?”

“Boy,” he said, “if I was to tell you, then you wouldn’t have any-
thing to think about.”

So I never did know.

But I did see Willie shake hands that morning with Tiny Duffy
and fail to wink at him. He just stood there in front of Mr. Duffy,
and when the great man, not rising, finally extended his hand with
the reserved air of the Pope offering his toe to the kiss of a Camp
bellite, Willie took it and gave it the three pumps which seemed to
be regulation up in Mason City.

Alex sat down at the table, and Willie just stood there, as though
waiting to be invited, till Alex kicked the fourth chair over a few
inches with his foot and said, “Git off yore dogs, Willie,”

Willie sat down and laid his gray felt hat on the marble top in
front of him. The edges of the brim crinkled and waved up all
around off the marble like a piecrust before grandma trims it.
Willie just sat there behind his hat and his blue-sttriped Christmas
tie and waited, with his hands laid in his lap.

Slade came in from the front, and said, “Beer?”

19 ,

'*A11 round/’ Mr. Duffy ordered.

“Not for me, thank you kindly,” Willie said.

“All round,” Mr. Duffy ordered again, with a wave of the hand
that had the diamond ring.

“Not for me, thank you kindly,” Willie said.

Mr. Duffy, with some surprise and no trace of pleasure, turned
his gaze upon Willie, who seemed unaware of the significance of
the event, sitting upright in his little chair behind the hat and the
tie. Then Mr. Duffy looked up at Slade, and jerking his head
toward Willie, said, “Aw, give him some beer.”

“No, thanks,” Willie said, with no more emotion than you would
put into the multiplication table.

“Too strong for you?” Mr. Duffy demanded.

“No,” Willie replied, “but no thank you.”

“Maybe the school-teacher don’t let him drink nuthen,” Alex
offered.

“Lucy don’t favor drinking,” Willie said quietly. “For a fact.”

“What she don’t know don’t hurt her,” Mr. Du^ said.

“Git him some beer,” Alex said to Slade.

“All round,” Mr. Duffy repeated, with the air of closing an issue.

Slade looked at Alex and he looked at Mr. Duffy and he looked
at Willie. He flicked his towel halfheartedly in the direction of a
cruising fly, and said: “I sells beer to them as wants it. I ain’t mak-
ing nobody drink it.”

Perhaps that was the moment when Slade made his fortune.
How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at
the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead,
and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely
ruffles the leaf of the willow.

Well, anyway, when Repeal came and mailmen had to use Mack
trucks to haul the applications for licenses over to the City Hall,
Slade got a license. He got a license immediately, and he got a swell
location, and he got the jack to put in leather chairs kind to the
femurs, and a circular bar; and Slade, who never had a dime in his
life after he paid rent and protection, now stands in the shadows
under the murals of undressed dames in the midst of the glitter of
chromium and tinted mirrors, wearing a double-breasted blue suit,
with what’s left of his hair plastered over his skull, and keeps one
eye on the black boys in white jackets who tote the poison and the
other on the blonde at the cash register who knows that her duties
are not concluded when the lights are turned off at g:oo a.m., and
the strains of a three-piece string ensemble soothe the nerves of the
customers.

How did Slade get the license so quickly? How did he get the
lease when half the big boys in the business were after that corner?
How did he get the jack for the leather chairs and the string en-
semble? Slade never confided in me, but I figure Slade got his re-
ward for being an honest man.

Anyway, Slade’s statement of principle about the beer question
closed the subject that morning. Tiny Duffy lifted a face to Slade
with the expression worn by the steer when you give it the hammer;
then, as sensation returned, he took refuge in his dignity. Alex per-
mitted himself the last luxury of irony. Says Alex: “Well, maybe
you got some orange pop for him.’* And when the whicker of his
mirth had died away, Slade said: “I reckin I have. If he wants it.”

“Yes,” Willie said, “I think I’ll take some orange pop.”

The beer came, and the bottle of pop. The bottle of pop had two
straws in it. Willie lifted his two hands out of his lap where they
had decorously lain during the previous conversation, and took the
bottle between them. He tilted the bottle slightly toward him, not
lifting it from the table, and affixed his lips to the straws. His lips
were a little bit meaty, but they weren’t loose. Not exactly. Maybe
at first glance you might think so. You might think he had a mouth
like a boy, not quite shaped up, and that was the way he looked
that minute, all right, leaning over the bottle and the straws stuck
in his lips, which were just puckered up. But if you stuck around
long enough, you’d see something a little different. You would see
that they were hung together, all right, even if they were meaty. His
face was a little bit meaty, too, but thin-skinned, and had freckles.
His eyes were big, big and brown, and he’d look right at you, out
of the middle of that thin-skinned and freckled and almost pudgy
face (at first you would think it was pudgy, then you would
change your mind), and the dark brown, thick hair was tousled
and crinkled down over his forehead, which wasn’t very high in the
first place, and the hair was a little moist. There was little Willie.
There was Cousin Willie from the country, from up at Mason City,
with his Christmas tie, and maybe you would take him out to the
park and show him the swans.

Alex leaned toward Duffy, and said confidingly, “Willie— he’s in
poly-ticks.”

Duffy’s features exhibited the slightest twitch of interest, but the
twitch was dissipated into the vast oleaginous blankness which was
the face of Duffy in repose. He did not even look at Willie.

“Yeah,” Alex continued, leaning closer and nodding sideways at
Willie, “yeah, in poly-ticks. Up in Mason City.”

Mr. Duffy’s head did a massive quarter-revolution in the direo

tion of Willie and the pale-blue eyes focused upon him from the
great distance. Not that the mention of Mason City was calculated
to impress Mr. Duffy, but the fact that Willie could be in politics
anywhere, even in Mason City, where, no doubt, the hogs scratched
themselves against the underpinnings of the post office, raised cer-
tain problems which merited passing attention. So Mr. Duffy gave
his attention to Willie, and solved the problem. He solved it by
deciding that there wasn’t any problem. Willie was not in poli-
tics. Not in Mason City or anywhere else. Alex Michel was a liar
and the truth was not in him. You could look at Willie and see
that he never had been and never would be in politics. Duffy
could look at Willie and deduce the fact that Willie was not in
politics. So he said, “Yeah,” with heavy irony, and incredulity was
obvious upon his face.

Not that I much blame Duffy. Duffy was face to face with the
margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse, where the
stream of time dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the for-
mula fails in the test tube, where chaos and old night hold sway
and we hear the laughter in the ether dream. But he didn’t know
he was, and so he said, “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Alex echoed, without irony, and added, “Up in Mason
City. Willie is County Treasurer. Ain't you, Willie?”

“Yes,” Willie said, “County Treasurer.”

“My God,” Duffy breathed, with the air of a man who discovers
that he has built upon sands and dwelt among mock shows.

“Yeah,” Alex iterated, “and Willie is down here on business for
Mason County, ain’t you, Willie?”

Willie nodded.

“About a bond issue they got up there,” Alex continued. “They
gonna build a schoolhouse and it’s a bond issue.”

Duffy’s lips worked, and you could catch the discreet glimmer of
the gold in the bridgework, but no word came forth. The moment
was too full for sound or foam.

But it was true. Willie was the County Treasurer and he was^
that day long ago, in the city on business about tlie bond issue for
the schoolhouse. And the bonds were issued and the schoolhouse
built, and more than a dozen years later the big black Cadillac with
the Boss whipped past the schoolhouse, and then Sugar-Boy really
put his foot down on the gas and we headed out, still on the almost
new slab of Number 58.

We had done about a mile, and not a word spoken, when thr
Boss turned around from the front seat and looked at me and said,

'"Jack, make a note to find out something about Malaciah’s boy and
the killing.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Hell, I don’t know, but he’s a good boy.”

“Malaciah’s name, I mean,” I said.

“Malaciah Wynn,” the Boss said.

I had my notebook out now and wrote it down, and wrote down,
stabbing,

“Find out when the trial is set and get a lawyer down. A good
one, and I mean a good one that’ll know how to handle it and let
him know he God-damn well better handle it, but don’t get a guy
that wants his name in lights.”

“Albert Evans,” I said, “he ought to do.”

“Uses hair oil,” the Boss said. “Uses hair oil and slicks it back
till the top of his head looks like the black ball on a pool table. Get
somebody looks like he didn’t sing with a dance band. You losing
your mind?”

“All right,” I said, and wrote in my notebook, Abe Lincoln type.
I didn’t have to remind myself about that I just wrote because I
had got in the habit. You can build up an awful lot of habits in
six years, and you can fill an awful lot of little black books in that
time and put them in a safety-deposit box when they get full be-
cause they aren’t something to leave around and because they would
be worth their weight in gold to some parties to get their hands on.
Not that they ever got their hands on them, I never needed money
that bad. But I had the habit of saving them. A man’s got to carry
something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark back-
ward and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black
books. The little black books lie up there in the safety-deposit box,
and there are your works of days and hands all cozy in the dark in
the little box and the world’s great axis grinds.

“You pick him,” the Boss said, “but keep out of sight. Put one
of your pals on him, and pick your pal,”

“I get you,” I replied, for I got him.

The Boss was just about to turn around and divide his attention
between the highway and Sugar-Boy’s speedometer, when Duffy
cleared his throat and said, “Boss.”

“Yeah?” the Boss said.

“You know who it was got cut?”

“No,” the Boss said, getting ready again to turn around, “and I
don’t care if it was the sainted uncut maiden aunt of the Apostle
'Paul.” '

Mr. Duffy cleared his throat, the way he always did in late years

when he was congested with phlegm and an idea. ‘*I happened to
notice in the paper/* he began. '1 happened to notice back when
it happened, and the feller got cut was the son of a doctor up in
this neighborhood. I don*t recall what his name was but he was
a doctor. The paper said so. Now—** Mr. Duffy was going right on
talking to the back of the Boss’s head. The Boss hadn’t paid any
mind, it seemed. “Now, it would appear to me,” Mr. Duffy said,
and cleared his pipes again, “it would appear to me maybe that
doctor might be pretty big around here. You know how a doctor is
in the country. They think he is somebody. And maybe it got out
how you was mixed up with trying to get the feller Wynn’s boy
off, and it wouldn’t do you any good. You know, politics,” he ex-
plained, “you know how politics is. Now it—**

The Boss whipped his head around to look at Mr. Duffy so fast
all of a sudden there wasn’t anything but a blur. It was as though
his big brown pop eyes were looking out the back of his head
through the hair, everything blurred up together. That is slightly
hyperbolic, but you get what I mean. The Boss was like that. He
gave you the impression of being a slow and deliberate man to look
at him, and he had a way of sitting loose as though he had sunk
inside himself and was going down for the third time and his eyes
would blink like an owl’s in a cage. Then all of a sudden he would
make a move. It might just be to reach out and grab a fly out of
the air that was bothering him, that trick I saw an old broken-
down pug do once who hung around a saloon. He would make bets
he could catch a fly out of the air with his fingers, and he could.
The Boss could do that. Or he would whip his head at you when
you said something he hadn’t seemed to be listening to. He whipped
his head round now to Duffy and fixed his gaze on him for an
instant before he said quite simply and expressively, “Jesus.” Then
he said, “Tiny, you don’t know a God-damned thing. In the firrt
place, I’ve known Malaciah Wynn all my life, and his boy is a
good boy and I don’t care who he cut. In the second place, it was a
fair fight and he had bad luck and when it’s like that by the time
die trial comes up folks are always feeling for the feller who’s being
tried for murder when he just had bad luck because the fellow died.
In the third place, if you had picked the wax out of your ears you’d
heard me tell Jack to prime the lawyer through a pal and to get
one didn’t want his name in lights. As far as that lawyer knows or
anybody else knows, he’s been sent by the Pope. And all he wants
to know anyway is whether the foliage he gets out of it has those
little silk threads in it. Is all that clear or do you want me to draw a
picture?”

'*1 get you/’ Mr. DuflEy said, and wet his lips.

But the Boss wasn’t listening now. He had turned back to the
highway and the speedometer and had said to Sugar-Boy, “God’s
sake, you think we want to admire the landscape? We’re late now.”

Then you felt Sugar-Boy take up that last extra stitch.

But not for long. In about half a mile, we hit the turn-off.
Sugar-Boy turned off on the gravel and we sprayed along with the
rocks crunching and popping up against the underside of the fen-
der like grease in a skillet. We left a tail of dust for the other car
to ride into.

Then we saw the house.

It was set on a little rise, a biggish box of a house, two-story, rec-
tangular, gray, and unpainted, with a tin roof, unpainted too and
giving off blazes under the sun for it was new and the rust hadn’t
bitten down into it yet, and a big chimney at each end. We pulled
up to the gate. The house was set up close to the road, with a good
hog-wire fence around the not very big yard, and with some crepe
myrtles in bloom the color of raspberry ice cream and looking cool
in the heat in the corner of the yard and one live oak, nothing to
brag on and dying on one side, in front of the house, and a couple
of magnolias off to one side with rusty-looking tinny leaves. There
wasn’t much grass in the yard, and a half dozen hens wallowed and
fluffed and cuck-cucked in the dust under the magnolia trees. A big
white hairy dog like a collie or a shepherd was lying on the front
porch, a little one-story front porch that looked stuck on the box of
the house, like an afterthought.

It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the
middle of tlie afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the
dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the
woman who has finished washing up the dishes and has swept the
kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has
pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on
her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and
a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the
perspiration. She listens to the flies cruising around the room, then
she listens to your motor getting big out on the road, then it shrinks
off into the distance and she listens to the flies. That was the kind
of house it was.

One time I had wondered why the Boss never had the house
painted after he got his front feet in the trough and a dollar wasn't
the reason you got up in the morning any more. Then I figured
the Boss knew best. Suppose he had painted it up, then the next
fellow down the road would be saying to the next one, “Seen Old

-25, , ,

Man Stark got his house painted? Yeali, putten on airs. Hit looks
lak hit wiiz good enuff fer him to live in all his life lak hit ’vvuz, and
his boy gits up thar in the cappy-tell, and hit ain’t good enuff no
more. Fust thing you know and Old Man Stark’ll be going to the
pri\7 in the house and maken ’em cook cabbige out behind the
barn.” (As a matter of fact. Old Man Stark was going to the privy
in the house, for the Boss had put in running water and a bath-
room. Water pumped by a little automatic electric pump. But you
can’t see a commode from the road when you pass by. It doesn’t hit
you in the eye or run out and bite you in the leg. And what the
voter doesn’t know doesn’t prey on his mind.)

Anyway, if he had painted the house it wouldn’t have made half
as good a picture as it was going to make that day with Willie and
his Old Man on the front steps, with Lucy Stark and the boy and
the old white dog.

The old man was on the front steps now. By the time we got
through the front gate, which had a couple of old plow points hung
on a wire to pull it shut and clank to announce the visitor, and had
started up the path, the old man had come out the door. He
stopped on the steps and waited, a not very tall old man, and thin,
wearing blue jean pants and a blue shirt washed so much that it
had a powdery pastel shade to it and a black bow tie, the kind that
comes ready-tied on an elastic band. We got up close and could see
his face, brown and tooled-looking, with the skin and flesh thin on
the bone and hanging down from the bone to give that patient look
old men's faces have, and his gray hair plastered down on his nar-
row, egg- thin old skull— the hair still wet as though he had given
it a dab with the wet brush when he heard the car, just to be look-
ing right at the last minute— and slow blue eyes in the middle of
the brown folded skin. The blue of the eyes was pale and washed
out like the blue of the shirt. He didn’t have any whiskers or mus-
tache, and you could see that he had shaved pretty recently, for
there were two or three little nicks, with the little crusts of blood
on them, where the razor had got tangled in the folds of the brown,
dry skin.

He stood on the steps, and for any sign he gave we might as well
have been back in the city.

Then the Boss went up to him, and put out his hand, and said,
“Hello, Pappy. How you making it?”

“Gitten along,” the old man said, and shook hands, or rather
putting out his hand with that same motion from the elbow which
Old Leather-Face had had in the drugstore back in Mason City, he
let the Boss shake it.

Lucy Stark went up to him, not saying anything, and kissed him
on his left cheek. He didn’t say anything either when she did it.
He just reached his right arm a little around her shoulder, not quite
a hug, just putting his arm there, and you could see his knobby,
crooked, brown old hand, which looked too big for the wristbone,
and the hand gave her shoulder two or three little tired, apologetic
pats. Then the hand dropped away and hung at his side beside the
blue jean pants leg, and Lucy Stark stepped back. Then he said,
not very loud, “Howdy, Lucy.”

“Howdy, Papa,” she said, and the hand hanging beside the jean
pants jerked as though it were getting ready to reach out and pat
her again, but it didn’t.

I suppose it didn’t have to, anyway. Not to tell Lucy Stark what
Lucy Stark already knew, and had known without words ever since
the days when she had married Willie Stark and had come out here
and had sat by the fire at night with the old man, whose wife had
been dead a long time then and who hadn’t had a woman in the
house for a long time. That they had something in common, Old
Man Stark and Lucy Stark, who had loved and married Willie
Stark, the Willie Stark who at that moment when she and the old
man sat wordlessly before the fire was upstairs in his room with his
face bent down over a law book, his face puzzled and earnest and
the tousle of hair hanging, and who was not with them by the fire,
but was up there in that room, but not even in that room, either,
but in a room, a world, inside himself where something was swell-
ing and growing painfully and dully and imperceptibly like a great
potato in a dark, damp cellar. What they had in common was a
world of wordless silence by the fire, a world which could absorb
effortlessly and perfectly the movements of their day and their occu-
pations, and of all the days they had lived, and of the days that
were to come for them to move about in and do the things which
were the life for which they were made. So they sat there in their
common knowledge, while the chunk on the hearth stewed and
hissed and crumbled, and were together in the down beat and pause
of the rhythm of their lives. That was what they had in common
now, and nothing could take that away. But they had something
else in common: they had in common the knowledge that they did
not have what they had. They did not have Willie Stark, who was
what they had.

The Boss was introducing Mr. Duffy, who was delighted to meet
Mr. Stark, yes, sir, and introducing the gang who had just come up
in the second car. Then the Boss jerked a thumb at me, and said to
his father, **You recollect Jack Burden, don’t you?”

“I recollect/* die old man said, and we shook hands.

We all went into the parlor, and sat around on a few pieces of
%tuflEed horsehair furniture, which had an acid, mummy smell in
your parched-out nostrils, or on straight split-bottom chairs, which
Old Man Stark and the Boss had fetched in from the kitchen, and
the motes of dust swam in the rays of light striking in under the
shades on the western windows of the room through the one-time
white but now yellowdsh lace curtains, which looped uncertainly
from their rods like fish nets hung up to wait for mending. The
gang of us sat around, and moved our thighs on the horsehair or
on the split-bottom and stared down at the unpainted boards of the
floor or at the design on the linoleum mat in the middle of the
floor as though we were attending a funeral and ow^ed the dead man
some money. The linoleum mat was newish, and the colors were
still bright— reds and tans and blues slick and varnished-looking—
a kind of glib, impertinent, geometrical island floating there in the
midst of the cornerless shadows and the acid mummy smell and the
slow swell of Time which had fed into this room, day by day since
long back, as into a landlocked sea where the fish were dead and
the taste was brackish on your tongue. You had the feeling that if
the Boss and Mr. Duffy and Sadie Burke and the photographer and
the reporters and you and the rest got cuddled up together on that
linoleum mat it would lift off the floor by magic and scoop you all
up together and make a lazy preliminary circuit of the room and
whisk right out the door or out the roof like the floating island of
Gulliver or the carpet in the Arabian Nights and carry you off
where you and it belonged and leave Old Man Stark sitting there
as though nothing had happened, very clean and razor-nicked, with
his gray hair plastered down damp, sitting there by the table where
the big Bible and the lamp and the plush-bound album were un-
der the blank, devouring gaze of the whiskered face in the big
crayon portrait above tire mantel shelf.

Then the nigger woman brought in a pitcher of water on a tray,
with three glasses, slipping her feet in old tennis shoes dryly along
the boards. Lucy Stark took one glass and Sadie Burke another, and
the rest of us just passed around the third glass.

Then the photographer took a secret look at his watch, and
cleared his throat, and said, “Governor—**

"Teah?** the Boss answered.

“I just reckoned— if you and Mrs. Stark is rested and all— * he
made a sitting-down bow in the direction of Lucy Stark, a bow from
the waist that was quite a feat and gave the impression he had had

a couple too many for the heat and was passing out in the chair—
“if you all—”

The Boss stood up. “All right/’ he said, grinning. “I just reckon
I get you.” Then he looked at his wife questioningly.

Lucy Stark stood up, too.

“All set, Pappy,” the Boss said to the old man, and the old man
stood up, too.

The Boss led the way out to the front porch. We all tailed him
out like a procession. The photographer went to the second car
and unpacked a tripod and the rest of his plunder and got it rigged
up facing the steps. The Boss was standing on the steps, blinking
and grinning, as though he were half asleep and knew what kind
of a dream he was going to have.

“We’ll just take you first, Governor,” the photographer said, and
the rest of us eased off the porch and out of range.

The photographer hid his head under the black cloth, then he
popped out again all agog with an idea. “The dog,” he said, “get
the dog in there with you, Governor. You be petting the dog or
something. Right there on the steps. It’ll be swell. It will be the
nuts. You be petting that dog, he’s pawing up on you like he was
glad to see you when you come home. See? It will be the nuts.”

“Sure, the nuts,” the Boss said.

Then he turned toward the old white dog, which hadn’t moved
a muscle since the Cadillac pulled up at the gate and was lying over
to one side of the porch like a worn-out fur rug. “Here, Buck,” the
Boss said, and snapped his fingers.

But the dog didn’t show a thing.

“Here, Buck,” the Boss called.

Tom Stark prodded the dog with his toe for a little encourage-
ment, but he might just as well have been prodding a bolster.

“Buck is gitten on,” Old Man Stark said. “He ain’t right spry any
more.” Then the old man went to the steps and stooped down
with a motion which made you expect to hear the sound of old
rusty hinges on a barn door. “Hi, Buck, hi, Buck,” the old man
wheedled without optimism. He gave up, and lifted his gaze to the
Boss. “If he was hongry now,” he said, and shook his head. “If he
was hongry we could guile him. But he ain’t hongry. His teeth gone
bad.”

The Boss looked at me, and I knew what I was paid to do.

“Jack,” the Boss said, “get the hairy bastard up here and make
him look like he was glad to see me.”

I was supposed to do a lot of different things, and one of them
was to lift up fifteen^year-old, hundt'ed-and-thhty-five-pound hairy

white dogs on summer afternoons and paint an expression or unuts
terable bliss upon their faithful features as they gaze deep, deep
into the Boss’s eyes. I got hold of Buck’s forelegs, as though I were
girding myself to shove a wheelbarrow, and heaved. It didn’t work.
I got his front end up for a second, but just as 1 got him up, he
breathed out and I breathed in. One gust of Buck was enough. It
was like a gust from a buzzard’s nest. I was paralyzed. Buck hit the
porch boards and lay there like the old polar-bear rug he resembled.

Then Tom Stark and one of the reporters shoved on the tail end
and I heaved on the front end and held my breath and we got
Buck the seven feet to the Boss. The Boss braced himself, and v^e
heaved up the front end, and the Boss got a gust of Buck.

That gust was enough.

'‘God’s sake. Pappy,” the Boss demanded as soon as he had mas-
tered his spasm, “what you been feeding this dog?”

“He ain’t got any appetite,” Old Man Stark said.

“He ain’t got any appetite for violets,” the Boss said, and spat
on the ground.

“The reason he fell,” the photographer observed, “was because
his hind legs gave down. Once we get him propped we got to work
fast.”

“We?” the Boss said. “Wei What the hell you mean we. You
come kiss him. One whiff would curdle milk and strip a pine tree.
We, hell!”

The Boss took a deep breath, and we heaved again. It didn’t
work. Buck didn’t have any starch in him. We tried six or seven
times, but it was no sale. Finally the Boss had to sit down on the
steps, and we dragged Buck up and laid the faithful head on the
Boss’s knee. The Boss put his hand on Buck’s head and looked at
the photographer’s birdie. The photographer shot it, and said, “It
is the nuts,” and the Boss said, “Yeah, the nuts.”

The Boss sat there a few seconds with his hand on Buck’s head.
“A dog,” the Boss said, “is man’s best friend. Old Buck, he’s the
best friend I ever had.” He scratched the brute’s head. “Yeah, good
old Buck,” the Boss said, “the best friend I ever had. But God damn
it,” he said, and stood up so quick that Buck’s head slid off his knee,
“he don’t smell a bit better’n the rest of ’em.”

“Is that for the record. Boss?” one of the reporters asked.

“Sure,” the Boss said. “He smells just like the rest of ’em.”

Then we cleared Buck’s carcass off the steps, and the photogra-
pher settled into the grind. He took the Boss and the family in
every possible combination. Then he got his rig together, and said:

“Governor, you know we want a picture of you upstairs. In die
room you used to have when you were a kid. It will be the nuts.’'

“Yeah,” the Boss said, “the nuts.”

That was my idea. It would be the nuts all right. The Boss sit-
ting there with an old schoolbook in his hands. A good example
for the tots. So we went upstairs.

It was a little room, with bare board floor and tongue-and-groove
beaded walls, which had been painted yellow one time, but had the
paint crazing off the wood now in the sections where any paint was
left. There was a big wooden bed with a high head and foot stand-
ing somewhat off the perpendicular, and a white counterpane on
the bed. There was a table— a pine table— and a couple of straight
chairs, and a stove— the kind of tin stove they call a trash-burner,
pretty rusty now— and against the wall beyond the stove a couple of
home-made bookcases, crammed with books. Third readers and
geographies and algebras and such in one of them, and a lot of
crummy old law books in the other.

The Boss stood in the middle of the floor and took a good look,
all around, while the rest of us hung around the door bunched up
like sheep and waited. “Jesus,” the Boss said, “put the old white
thunder-mug under the bed and itMl look just like home.”

I looked over at the bed, and the crockery wasn’t there. It was the
only prop missing. That and a kid with a pudgy face and freckles
on his face and sandy hair falling down on his forehead, bending
down at the table by a coal-oil lamp— it must have been a coal-oil
lamp then— and a pencil in his hand, tooth marks on the pencil
where he’d been gnawing at it, and the fire in the trash-burner get-
ting low, and the wind pounding on the north side of the house,
pounding down off the Dakotas a thousand miles away and across
the plains which were icy and pearl-blind with the snow polished
hard under the wind and glimmering in the dark, and across the
river bottoms, and across the hills where tiie pine trees had stood
once and moaned in the wind but where there wasn’t anything to
break the wind now. The sash in the window on the north wall of
the room would rattle under the wind, and the flame in the coal-
oil lamp would bend and shiver in what current of air sneaked in,
but the kid wouldn’t look up. He would gnaw his pencil, and
hunch down. Then after a while he would blow out the lamp and
pull off his clothes and get into bed, wearing his underwear. The
sheets would be cold to the skin and stiff-feeling. He would lie
there and shiver in the dark. The wind would come down a thou-
sand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and
inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting

tiii he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head
with a hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the
dark outside. He wouldn't have any name for what was big inside
him. Maybe there isn't any name.

That was all there was missing from the room, the kid and the
thunder-mug. Otherwise it was perfect.

“Yeah/’ the Boss was saying, “it's sure gone. But it's O.K. by me.
Maybe sitting over running water puts phlegm in your gut like the
old folks say, but it would sure have made learning law a hell of a
lot more comfortable. And you wouldn't have to waste so much
time."

The Boss was a slow mover. Many’s the time we’ve settled at
fairs of state through a bathroom door, the Boss on the inside and
me on the outside sitting on a chair with my little black notebook
on my knee and the telephone ringing to beat hell.

But now the photographer started arranging things. He got the
Boss to sit at the table and pore over a dog-eared reader, and he
fired off his flash bulb and got that. And he got a half dozen more,
the Boss sitting in a chair % the trash-burner, holding an old law
book on his knees, and God knows what else.

I wandered off downstairs and left them preparing “the docu-
ments for posterity.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs I could hear voices in the
parlor, and figured it was the old man and Lucy Stark and Sadie
Burke and the kid. I vrent out the back way, to the back porch. I
could hear the nigger woman puttering around in the kitchen,
humming to herself about her and Jesus. I walked across the back
yard, where there wasn't any grass. When the fall rains came there
wouldn’t be anything here but a loblolly with the crazy marks
made in it by hens' feet. But it was dust now. There was a china-
berry tree beside the gate letting you into the back lot, and as I
went through the gate the berries scattered on the ground crunched
under my feet like bugs.

I went on down the lot, past a row of gable-shaped chicken
coops, made of wood which had been split out like shingles, and set
on cypress chunks to keep them out of the wet. I went on down to
the barn and stable lot, where a couple of able-bodied but moth-
eaten mules hung their heads in the unflagging shame of their
species beside a big iron pot, the kind they use for cooking up
molasses. The pot was a water trough now. There was a pipe stick-
ing up beside it with a faucet on it. One of the Boss's modem im-
provements you couldn't see from the road.

I went on past the stables, which were built of log, but with a

good tin roof, and leaned on the fence, looking off down the rise.
Back of the barn the ground was washed and gullied somewhat,
with piles of brush chucked into the washes here and there to stop
the process. As though it ever would. A hundred yards oflE, at the
foot of the rise, there was a patch of woods, scrub oak and such.
The ground must have been swampy down there, for the grass and
weeds at the edge of the trees were lush and tropical green. Against
the bare ground beyond it looked too green to be natural. I could
see a couple of hogs lounging down there on their sides, like big
gi'ay blisters popped up out of the ground.

It was getting toward sunset now. I leaned on the fence and
looked off west across the country where the light was stretching
out, and breathed in that dry, clean, ammoniac smell you get
around stables at sunset on a summer day. I figured they would
find me when they wanted me. I didn’t have the slightest notion
when that would be. The Boss and his family, I reckoned, would
spend the night at his pappy’s place. The reporters and the photog-
rapher and Sadie would get on back to the city. Mr. Duffy— maybe
he was supposed to put up in Mason City at the hotel. Or maybe
he and I were supposed to stay at Pappy’s place too. If they put us
in the same bed though, I was just going to start walking in to
Mason City. Then there was Sugar-Boy. But I quit drinking about
it. I didn’t give a damn what they did.

I leaned on the fence, and the posture bowed my tail out so that
the cloth of my pants pulled tight and pressed the pint against my
left hip. I thought about that for a minute and admired the sunset
colorations and breathed the dry, clean, ammoniac smell, and then
pulled out the bottle. I took a drink and put it back. I leaned on
the fence and waited for the sunset colorations to explode in my
stomach, which they did.

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I
didn’t look around. If I didn’t look around it would not be true
that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and
that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got
hold of the principle out of a book when I was in college, and I
had hung on to it for grim death. I owed my success in life to that
principle. It had put me where I was. What you don’t know don’t
hurt you, for it ain’t real. They called that Idealism in my book I
had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle
I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If
you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on
around you because it isn’t real anyway.

The steps came closer and closer, padded in the soft dust. 1 didn't

look up. Then I felt the wire of the fence creak and give because
somebody else was leaning against it and admiring the sunset. Mr.
X and I admired the sunset together for a couple of minutes, and
nothing said. Except for the sound of his breathing I wouldn’t have
known he was there.

Then there was a movement and the wre shifted wiien Mr. X
took his weight off it. Then the hand patted my left hip, and the
voice said, ‘‘Gimme a slug.” It was the Boss’s voice.

“Take it,” I said. “You know where it lives.”

He lifted up my coattail and pulled out the bottle. I could hear
the gurgle as he did the damage. Then the wire shifted again as
he leaned against it.

“I figured you’d come down here,” he said.

“And you wanted a drink,” 1 replied without bitterness.

“Yeah,” he said, “and Pappy doesn’t favor drinking. Never did.”

I looked up at him. He was leaning on the fence, bearing down
on the wire in a way not to do it any good, with the bottle held in
both hands, corked, and his forearms propped over the wire.

“It used to be Lucy didn’t favor it either,” I said.

“Things change,” he said. He uncorked the bottle and took an-
other pull, and corked it again. “But Lucy,” he said, “I don’t know
whether she’s changed or not. I don’t know whether she favors it
or not now. She never touches it herself. Maybe she sees it eases a
man’s nerves.”

I laughed. “You haven’t got any nerves,” I told him.

“I’m a bundle of nerves,” he said, and grinned.

We kept on leaning against the fence, watching the light lying
across the country and hitting the clump of trees down the rise.
The Boss leaned his head a little forward and let a big globule of
spit form at his lips and let it fall through the space between his
forearms down to the board hog trough just over the fence from us.
The trough was dry, with a few odd red grains of corn and a few
shreds of shucks lying in it and on the ground by it.

“Things don’t change much around here, though,” the Boss said.

That didn’t seem to demand any response, and so I didn’t give it
any.

“I bet I dumped ten thousand gallons of swill into that trough,”
he said, “one time and another.” He let another glob of spit fall
into the trough. “I bet I slopped five hundred head of hogs out of
this trough,” he said. “And,” he said, “by God, I’m still doing it
Pouring swill.”

“Well,” I said, “swill is what they live on, isn’t it?”

He didn’t say anything to that.

The hinges of the gate up the lot creaked again, and I looked
around. There wasn't any reason not to now. It was Sadie Burke.
She was plowing her white oxfords through the dust as though she
meant business, and every time she took a stride it looked as though
she were going to pop the skirt of her blue-striped seersucker suit,
she was in such a rush. The Boss turned around, looked at the
bottle in his hand, then passed it to me. ‘‘What’s up?” he asked her
when she got within ten feet.

She didn’t answer right away, but came up close. She was breath-
ing hard from the rush. The light hit her on her slightly pock-
marked face, which was damp now with perspiration, and her
chopped-off black hair was wild and electric on her head, and her
big, deep, powerful black eyes burned right out of her face into the
sunlight.

*‘What’s up?” the Boss demanded again.

“Judge Irwin,” she managed to get out with what breath she had
after the rush,

“Yeah?” the Boss said. He was still lounging against the wire, but
he was looking at Sadie as though she might draw a gun and he was
planning on beating her to the draw.

“Matlock called up— long-distance from town— and he said the
afternoon paper—”

“Spill it,” the Boss said, “spill it.”

“Damn it,” Sadie said, “I’ll spill it when I get good and ready.
I’ll spill it when I get my breath. If I’m good and ready, and if
you—”

“You’re using up a lot of breath right now,” the Boss said with
a tone of voice which made you think of rubbing your hand down
a cat’s back, just as soft.

“It’s my breath,” Sadie snapped at him, “and nobody’s bought it.
I damned near break myself down running out here to tell you
something and then you say spill it, spill it. Before I can get my
breath. And I’ll just tell you when I get good and ready. When I
get my breath and—”

“You don’t sound exactly wind-broke,” the Boss observed, lean-
ing back on the hog wire and grinning.

“You think it’s so damned funny,” Sadie said, “oh, yeah, so
damned funny.”

The Boss didn’t answer that. He just kept leaning on the wire
as though he had all day before him, and kept on grinning. When
he grinned like that it didn’t do much to soothe Sadie’s feelings, I
had observed in the past. And the symptoms seemed to be running
true to form.

So I decorously withdrew my gaze from the pair, and resumed
my admiration of the dying day on the other side of the hog lot
and the elegiac landscape. Not that they would have bothered about
me if they had anything on their minds—neither one of them.
Powers, Tlirones, and Dominations might be gathered round, and
if Sadie felt like it she would cut loose, and the Boss wasn’t pre-
cisely of a shrinking disposition. They’d get started like that over
nothing at all sometimes, the Boss just lying back and grinning and
working Sadie up till those big black glittering eyes of hers would
almost pop out of her head and a hank of her black hair would
separate from the tangle and hang down by her face so she’d have
to swipe it back with the back of a hand. She would say plenty
while she got worked up, but the Boss wouldn’t say much. He’d
just grin at her. He seemed to take a relish in getting her worked
up that way and lying back and watching it. Even when she slapped
him once, a good hard one, he kept on looking at her that way, as
though she were a hula girl doing a dance for him. He relished her
getting worked up, all right, unless she finally landed on a sore
spot. She was the only one who knew the trick. Or had the nerve.
Then the show would really start. They wouldn’t care who was
there. Certainly not if I was there, and there wasn’t any reason for
me to avert my face out of delicacy. I had been a piece of furniture
a long time, but some taint of the manners my grandma taught me
still hung on and now and then got the better of my curiosity. Sure
I was a piece of furniture— with two legs and a pay check coming—
but I looked off at the sunset, anyway.

'‘Oh, it’s so damned funny,” Sadie was saying, “but you won’t
think it’s so damned funny when I tell you.” She stopped, then
said, “Judge Irwin has come out for Callahan.”

There wasn’t any sound for what must have been three seconds
but seemed like a week while a mourning dove down in the clump
of trees in the bottom where the hogs were gave a couple of tries at
breaking his heart and mine.

Then I heard the Boss say, “The bastard.”

“It was in the afternoon paper— the endorsement,” Sadie elabo-
rated. “Matlock telephoned from town. To let you know,”

“The two-timing bastard,” the Boss said.

Then he heaved up off the wire, and I turned around. I figured
the conclave was about to break up. It was. “Come on,” the Boss
said, and started moving up the hill toward the house, Sadie by his
side popping her seersucker skirt to keep up with him, and I trail-
ing.

About the time we got to the gate where the chinaberry tree was

and the berries on the ground popped under your feet, the Boss
said to Sadie, ‘*Get 'em cleared out.”

“Tiny was figuring on having supper out here,” Sadie said, ‘'and
Sugar-Boy was gonna drive him to Mason City in time for the
eight-o’clock train to town. You asked him.”

“I’m un-asking him,” the Boss replied, “Clear ’em ail out.”

“It’ll be a privilege,” Sadie said, and I reckoned she spoke from
the heart.

She cleared them out, and fast. Their car went off down the
gravel road with the springs flat on the rear axle and human flesh
oozing out the windows, then the evening quiet descended upon us.
I went to the other side of the house where a hammock made out
of wire and barrel staves, the kind they rig up in that part of the
world, was swung between a post and the live oak. I took off my
coat and hung it on the post, and dropped my bottle into the side
pocket so it wouldn’t break my hip bone when I lay down, and
climbed into the hammock.

The Boss was down at the other end of die yard where the crepe
myrtles were, prowling up and down on the dusty grass steins. Well,
it was all his baby, and he could give it suck. I just lay there in the
hammock. I lay there and watched the undersides of the oak leaves,
dry and grayish and dusty-green, and some of them I saw had rusty-
corroded-looking spots on them. Those were die ones which would
turn loose their grip on the branch before long— not in any breeze,
the fibers would just relax, in the middle of the day maybe with
the sunshine bright and the air so still it aches like the place where
the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or
aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street
corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how
things once were and how they might have been yet if what hap-
pened had not happened.

Then, while I was watching the leaves I heard a dry, cracking
sound down toward the barnyard. Then it came again. Then I
figured out what it was. It was Sugar-Boy off down in the lot play-
ing with his .38 Special again. He would set up a tin can or a bottle
on a post, and turn his back to the post and start walking away,
carrying his baby in his left hand, by the barrel, the safety on, just
walking steadily away on his stumpy little legs with his always blue
serge pants bagging around his underslung behind and with the
last rays of the evening sun faintly glittering on his bald spot
among the scrubby patches of hair like bleached lichen. Then, all
of a sudden, he would stop walking, and grab the butt of the play-
pretty with his right hand, and wheel-aJi in one quick, awkward

motion, as though a spring had exploded inside him— and the play-
pretty would go bang, and the tin can would jump off the post or
the bottle would spray off in all directions. Or most likely. Then
Sugar-Boy would say, "'The b-b-b-bas-tud/’ and shake his head, and
the spit would fly.

There would be a single aracking sound and a long wait. That
meant he had hit it the first try, and was trudging back to the post
to set up another. Then, after a spell, there would be another crack,
and a wait. Then, one time, there came two cracks, close together.
That meant Sugar-Boy had missed the first try and had got it on
the second.

Then I must have dozed off, for I came to with the Boss standing
there, saying, “Time to eat.''

So we went in and ate.

We sat down at the table, Old Man Stark at one end and Lucy at
the other. Lucy wiped the perspiration-soaked wisp of hair back
from her face, and gave that last-minute look around the table to
see if anything was missing, like a general inspecting troops. She
was in her element, all right. She had been out of it for a long time,
but when you dropped her back in it she hit running, like a cat out
of a sack.

The jaws got to work around the table, and she watched them
work. She sat there, not eating much and keeping a sharp eye out
for a vacant place on any plate and watching the jaws work, and
as she sat there, her face seemed to smooth itself out and relax with
an inner faith in happiness the way the face of the chief engineer
does when he goes down to the engine room at night and the big
wheel is blurred out with its speed and the pistons plunge and re-
turn and the big steel throws are leaping in their perfect orbits like
a ballet, and the whole place, under the electric glare, hums and
glitters and sings like the eternal insides of God’s head, and the
ship is knocking off twenty-two knots on a glassy, starlit sea.

So the jaw muscles pumped all around the table, and Lucy Stark
sat there in the bliss of self-fulfillment.

I had just managed to get down the last spoonful of chocolate
ice cream, which I had had to tamp down into my gullet like wet
concrete in a posthole, when the Boss, who was a powerful and
systematic eater, took his last bite, lifted up his head, wiped off the
lower half of his face with a napkin, and said, “Well, it looks like
Jack and Sugar-Boy and me are going to take the night air down
the highway."

Lucy Stark looked up at the Boss right quick, then looked away,
and straightened a salt shaker. At first guess it might have been the

look any wife gives her husband when he shoves back after supper
and announces he thinks he’ll step down town for a minute. Then
you knew it wasn’t that. It didn’t have any question, or protest, or
rebuke, or command, or self-pity, or whine, or oh-so-you-don’t-love-
me-any-more in it. It just didn’t have anything in it, and that was
what made it remarkable. It was a feat. Any act of pure perception
is a feat, and if you don’t believe it, try it sometime.

But Old Man Stark looked at the Boss, and said, **I sorta reckined
—I reckined you was gonna stay out here tonight.” There wasn't
any trouble figuring out what he said, though. The child comes
home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the
woman, as the case may be, hasn't got anything to say to the child.
All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours
and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not
saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing
to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes
by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which
I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in
itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of
blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man
has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When
you get born your father and mother lost something out of them-
selves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and
you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get
as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family
reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is very much like
diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium. Anyway, that is
what I would have said back then, that evening.

So Old Man Stark swallowed his Adam's apple a couple of times
and lifted his misty, sad old blue eyes to the Boss, who happened
to be flesh of his flesh though you’d never guess it, and threw in the
hook. But it didn’t snag a thing. Not on Willie.

‘^Nope,” the Boss said, ‘T gotta shove.”

“I sorta reckined—” the old man began, then surrendered, and
tailed off, “but if’n it’s business—”

“It is not business,” the Boss said. “It is pure pleasure. At least
I’m aiming for it to be before I’m through.” Then he laughed and
got up from the table, and gave his wife a smack of a kiss on the
left cheek, slapped his son on the shoulder in that awkward way
fathers have of slapping their sons on the shoulder (there is always
a kind of apology in it, and anybody, even the Boss, who slapped
Tom Stark on the shoulder had better apologize, for he was an
arrogant bastard and when his father that night slapped him on

the shoulder he didn’t even bother to look up). Then the Boss said,
“Don’t wait up/’ and started out the door. Sugar-Boy and I fol-
lowed. That was the first news I had had that I was going to take
the night air. But it was all the warning you usually got from the
Boss. I knew enough to know that.

The Boss was already sitting in the front by the driver’s seat
when I got to the Cadillac. So I got in the back, and prepared my
soul for the experience of being hurled from one side to the other
when we hit the curves. Sugar-Boy crawled under the wheel, and
touched tlie starter, and began to make a sound like “Wh-wh-wh-
wh— ” A sound like an owl tuning up off in the swamp at night. If
he had enough time and the spit held out, he would ask, “Where
to?’’ But the Boss didn’t wait. He said, “Burden’s Landing.”

So that was it. Burden’s Landing. Well I ought to have guessed
that.

Burden’s Landing is one hundred and thirty miles from Mason
City, oflE to the southwest. If you multiply one hundred and thirty
by two it makes two hundred and sixty miles. It was near nine
o’clock and the stars were out and the ground mist was beginning
to show in the low places. God knew what time it would be when
we got back to bed, and up the next morning to face a hearty
breakfast and the ride back to the capital.

I lay back in the seat and closed my eyes. The gravel sprayed on
the undersides of the fenders, and then it stopped spraying and
the tail of the car lurched to one side, and me with it, and I knew
we were back on the slab and leveling out for the job.

We would go gusting along the slab, which would be pale in the
starlight between the patches of woods and the dark fields where the
mist was rising. Way oflE from the road a barn would stick up out
of the mist like a house sticking out of the rising water when the
river breaks the levee. Close to the road a cow would stand knee-
deep in the mist, with horns damp enough to have a pearly shine
in the starlight, and would look at the black blur we were as we
went whirling into the blazing corridor of light which we could
never quite get into for it would be always splitting the dark just
in front of us. The cow would stand there knee-deep in the mist
and look at the black blur and the blaze and then, not turning its
head, at the place where the black blur and blaze had been, with
the remote, massive, unvindictive indifference of God-All-Mighty
or Fate or me, if I were standing there knee-deep in the mist, and
the blur and the blaze whizzed past and withered on off between
the fields and the patches of woods.

But I wasn’t standing there in the field, in the dai'k, with the
mist turning slow around my knees and the ticking no-noise of the
night inside my head. I was in a car, headed back to Burden’s
Landing, which was named for the people from whom I got my
name, and which was the place where I had been born and raised*

We would go on between the fields until we hit a town. The
houses would be lined up along the street, under the trees, wth
their lights going out now, until we hit the main street, where the
lights would be bright around the doorway of the movie house and
the bugs would be zooming against the bulbs and would ricochet
off to hit the concrete pavement and make a dry crunch when
somebody stepped on them. The men standing in front of the pool
hall would look up and see the big black crate ghost down the
street and one of them would spit on the concrete and say, “The
bastard, he reckins he’s somebody,” and wish that he was in a big
black car, as big as a hearse and the springs soft as mamma’s breast
and the engine breathing without a rustle at seventy-five, going off
into the dark somewhere. Well, I was going somewhere. I was going
back to Burden’s Landing.

We would come into Burden’s Landing by the new boulevard
by the bay. The air would smell salty, with maybe a taint of the
fishy, sad, sweet smell of the tidelands to it, but fresh nevertheless.
It would be nearly midnight then, and the lights would be off in
the three blocks of down-town then. Beyond the down-town and
the little houses, there would be the other houses along the bay, set
back in the magnolias and oaks, with the white walls showing glim«
meringly beyond the darkness of the trees, and the jalousies, which
in the daytime would be green, looking dark against the white
walls. Folks would be lying back in the rooms behind the jalousies,
with nothing but a sheet over them. Well, I’d put in a good many
nights behind those jalousies, from the time I was little enough to
wet the bed. I’d been born in one of those rooms behind the

jalousies. And behind one set of them my mother would be lying
up there tonight, with a little fluting of lace on the straps of her
nightgown, and her face smooth like a girl’s except for the little
lines, which you wouldn’t be able to make out in tlie shadow any-
way, at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and one bare arm laid
out on the sheet with the sharp, brittle-looking, age-betraying hand
showing the painted nails. Theodore Murrell would be lying there,
too, breathing with a slightly adenoidal sibilance under his beauti-
ful blonde mustache. Well, it was all legal, for she was married to

Theodore Murrell, who was a lot younger than^njy. mioth^^ and
who had beautiful yellow hair scrolled on

int

(

I tnai ^^1.4

like taffy, and who was my stepfather. Well, he w^asn’t the first step^
father I had had.

Then, on down the row, behind its own live oaks and magnolias,
there would be the Stanton house, locked up and nobody behind
the jalousies, for Anne and Adam were in town now, and grown up
and never went fishing wdth me any more, and the old man was
dead. Then on down the row, where the open country began, would
be the house of Judge Irwin. We wouldn’t stop before we got there.
But we’d make a little call on the Judge.

'‘Boss,” I said.

The Boss turned around, and I saw the chunky black shape of his
head against the brightness of our headlights.

“What you gonna say to him?” I asked.

“Boy, you never know till the time comes,” he said. “Hell,” he
amended, “maybe I won’t say anything to him a-tall. I don’t know
as I’ve got anything to say to him. I just want to look at him good.”

“The Judge won’t scare easy,” I said. No, I didn’t reckon the
Judge would scare easy, thinking of the straight back of the man
who used to swing off the saddle and drop the bridle over a paling
on the Stanton fence and walk up the shell walk to the veranda
with his Panama in his hand and the coarse dark-red hair bristling
off his high skull like a mane and the hooked red nose jutting off
his face and the yellow irises of his eyes bright and hard-looking as
topaz. That was nearly twenty years before, all right, and maybe
the back wasn’t as straight now as it had been then (a thing like
that happens so slowly you don’t notice it) and maybe the yellow
eyes were a little bleary lately, but I still didn’t reckon the Judge
would scare easy. That was one thing on which I figured I could
bet: he wouldn’t scare. If he did, it was going to be a disappoint-
ment to me.

“No, I don’t count on him scaring easy,” the Boss said. “I just
want to look at him.”

“Well, God damn it,” I popped out, and came up off my shoulder
blades before I knew it, “you’re crazy to think you can scare himi’"

“Take it easy,” the Boss said, and laughed. I couldn’t see his face.
It was just a black blob against the glare of the headlights, with the
laugh coming out of it.

“I just want to look at him,” the Boss said, “like I told you.”

“Well, you sure picked a hell of a time and a hell of a long way
to go look at him,” I said, not feeling anything but peevish now,
and falling back on my shoulder blades where I belonged. “Why
don’t you get him to see you in town sometime?”

^'Sometime ain’t ever now/* the Boss said.

'It’s a hell of a thing/’ I said, “for you to be doing/’

“So you think it’s beneath my dignity, huh?” the Boss asked.

“Well, you’re Governor. They tell me.”

“Yeah, I m Governor, Jack, and the trouble with Governors is
they think they got to keep their dignity. But listen here, there
ain’t anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can
you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you
can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain’t built
that way.”

“All right,” I said.

“And when I get to be President, if I want to see somebody I’m
gonna go right out and see ’em.”

“Sure,” I said, “in the middle of the night, but when you do I
hope you leave me at home to get a night’s sleep maybe.”

“The hell I will,” he said. “When I’m President I'm gonna take
you with me. I’m gonna keep you and Sugar-Boy right in the White
House so I can have you all handy. Sugar-Boy can have him a pistol
range in the back hall and a brace of Republican Congressmen to
be caddy for him and set up the tin cans, and you can bring your
girls right in the big front door, and there’s gonna be a member of
the Cabinet to hold their coats and pick up hair pins after ’em.
There’s gonna be a special member of the Cabinet to do it. He’s
gonna be the Secretary of the Bedchamber of Jack Burden, and he
will keep the telephone numbers straight and send back any little
pink silk articles to the right address when they happen to get left
behind. Tiny’s got the build, so I’m gonna get him a little opera-
tion and put flowing silk pants on him and a turban and give him
a tin scimitar like he was a High Grand Shriner or something, and
he can sit on a tuliet outside your door and be the Secretary of the
Bedchamber. And how you like that, boy, huh?” And he reached
back over the back of the front seat and slapped me on the knee.
He had to reach a long way back, for it was a long way from the
front seat of the Cadillac to my knee even if I was lying on my
shoulder blades.

“You will go down in history,” I said.

“Boy, wouldn’t I!” And he started to laugh. He turned round to
watch the lit-up road, and kept on laughing.

Then we hit a little town and beyond it a filling station and
lunch stand. Sugar-Boy got some gas and brought the Boss and me
a couple of cokes. Then we went on.

The Boss didn’t say another word till we hit Burden’s Landing.
All he said then was, “Jack, you tell Sugar-Boy how to find the
house. It’s your pals live down here.”

Yes, my pais lived down there. Or had lived down there. Adam
and Anne Stanton had lived down there, in the white house where
their widowed father, the Governor, lived. They had been my
friends, Anne and Adam. Adam and I had fished and sailed all over
that end of the Gulf of Mexico, and Anne, who was big-eyed and
quiet-faced and thin, had been with us, close and never saying a
word. And Adam and I had hunted and camped all over the coun-
try, and Anne had been there, a thin-legged little girl about four
years younger than we were. And we had sat by the fire in the Stan-
ton house—or in my house— and had played with toys or read books,
while Anne sat there. Then after a long time Anne wasn’t a little
girl any more. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with
her that I lived in a dream. In that dream my heart seemed to be
ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it
swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an
end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain
at one time would happen. So now Anne was an old maid living
in the city, and even if she did look pretty good yet and wore
clothes that didn’t hurt her any, her laugh was getting brittle and
there was a drawn look on her face as though she were trying to
remember something. What was Anne trying to remember? Well,
I didn’t have to try to remember. I could remember but I didn’t
want to remember. If the human race didn’t remember anything
it would be perfectly happy. I was a student of history once in a
university and if I learned anything from studying history that was.
what I learned. Or to be more exact, that was what I thought I had
learned.

We would go down the Row— the line of houses facing the bay—
and that was the place where all my pals had been. Anne, who was
an old maid, or damned near it. Adam, who was a famous surgeon
and who was nice to me but didn’t go fishing with me any more.
And Judge Irwin, who lived in the last house, and who had been
a friend of my family and who used to take me hunting with him
and taught me to shoot and taught me to ride and read history to
me from leather-bound books in the big study in his house. After
Ellis Burden went away he was more of a father to me than those
men who had married my mother and come to live in Ellis Bur^
den’s house. And the Judge was a man.

So I told Sugar-Boy how to get through town and to the Row
where all my pals lived or had lived. We pulled through the town,
where the lights were out except for the bulbs hanging from the
telephone poles, and on out the Bay Road where the houses were
bone*white back among the magnolias and live oaks.

At xiight you pass through a little town where you once lived,
^ind you expect to see yourself wearing knee pants, standing all
alone on the street corner under the hanging bulbs, where the bugs
bang on the tin reflectors and splatter to the pavement to lie
f^tunned. You expect to see that boy standing there under the street
lamp, out too late, and you feel like telling him he ought to go
on home to bed or there will be hell to pay. But maybe you are
home in bed and sound asleep and not dreaming and nothing has
ever happened that seems to have happened. But, then, who the
hell is this in tire back seat of the big black Cadillac that comes
ghosting through the town? "Why, this is Jack Burden. Don’t you
remember little Jack Burden? He used to go out in his boat in the
afternoon on the bay to fish, and come home and eat his supper
and kiss his beautiful mother good night and say his prayers and go
to bed at nine-thirty. Oh, you mean old Ellis Burden’s boy? Yeah,
and that woman he married out of Texas— or was it Arkansas?— that
big-eyed thin-faced woman who lives up there in that old Burden
place now with that man she got herself. What ever happened to
Ellis Burden? Hell, I don’t know, nobody around here had any
word going on years. He was a queer ’un. Damn if he wasn’t queer,
going off and leaving a real looker like that woman out of Arkansas.
Maybe he couldn’t give her what she craved. Well, he give her that
boy, that Jack Burden. Yeah.

You come into the town at night and there are the voices.

We had got to the end of the Row, and I saw the house bone-
white back among the dark oak boughs.

“Here it is,” I said.

“Park out here,” the Boss said. And then to me, “There’s a light.
The bugger ain’t in bed. You go on and knock on the door and
tell him I want to see him.”

“Suppose he won’t open up?”

“He will,” the Boss said. “But if he won’t you make him. What
the hell do I pay you for?”

I got out of the car and went in the gate and started up the shell
walk under the black trees. Then I heard the Boss coming after
me. We went up the walk, with him just behind me, and up the
gallery steps.

The Boss stood to one side, and I pulled open the screen and
knocked on the door. I knocked again; then looking in through
the glass by the door I saw a door open off the hail— where the
library was, I remembered— then a side light come on in the hall.
He was coming to the door. I could see him through the glass while
he fumbled with the lock.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Good evening, Judge/’ I said.

He stood there blinking into the dark outside, trying to make
out my face.

“It's Jack Burden,” I said.

“Well, well, Jack— well I'll be jiggered!” And he put out his
hand. “Come in.” He even looked glad to see me.

I shook hands and stepped inside, where the mirrors in the peel-
ing gold frames glimmered on die walls in the rays of the not bright
side light, and the glass of the big hurricane lamps glimmered on
the marble-top stands.

“What can I do for you. Jack?” he asked me, and gave me a look
out of his yellow eyes. They hadn't changed much, even if the rest
of him had.

“Well,” I began, and didn't know how I was going to end, “I
just wanted to see if you were up and could talk to—”

“Sure, Jack, come on in. You aren't in any trouble, son? Let me
shut the door first, and—”

He turned to shut the door, and if his ticker hadn't been in good
shape for all his near three score and ten he'd have dropped dead.
For the Boss was standing there in the door. He hadn't made a
sound.

As it was, the Judge didn't drop dead. And his face didn't show
a thing. But I felt him stiiffen. You turn to shut a door some night
and find somebody standing there out of the dark, and you'll take
a jump, too.

“No,” the Boss said, easy and grinning, taking his hat off his head
and stepping inside just as though he'd been invited, which he
hadn't been, “no. Jack isn't in any trouble. Not that I know of.
Nor me either.”

The Judge was looking at me now. “I beg your pardon,” he said
to me, in a voice he knew how to make cold and rasping like an old
phonograph needle scraping on an old record, “I had forgotten for
the moment how well your needs are provided for.”

“Oh, Jack’s making out,” the Boss said.

“And you, sir—” the Judge turned on the Boss, and slanted his
yellow eyes down on him— for he was a half a head taller— and I
could see the jaw muscles twitch and knot under the folds of red-
rusty and seamed skin on his long jaw, “do you wish to say some-
thing to me?”

“Well, I don't know as I do,” the Boss remarked, offhand. “Not
at the moment.”

“Well,” the Judge said, “in that case—”

“Oh, something might develop/’ the Boss broke in. “You never
can tell. If we get the weight off our arches.”

“In that case/’ the Judge resumed, and it was an old needle and
an old record and it was scraping like a file on cold tin and nothing
human, “I may say that I was about to retire.”

“Oh, it s early yet,” the Boss said, and took his time giving Judge
Irwin the once-over from head to toe. The Judge was wearing an
old-fashioned velvet smoking jacket and tuxedo pants and a boiled
shirt, but he had taken off his collar and tie and the gold collar
button was shining just under the big old red Adam’s apple.
“Yeah,” the Boss went on, after he’d finished the once-over, “and
you’ll sleep better if you wait before going to bed and give that
fine dinner you had a chance to digest.”

And he just began walking down the hall toward the door where
the light was, the door to the library.

Judge Irwin looked at the Boss’s back as the Boss just walked
away, the Palm Beach coat all crumpled up where it had crawled
on the Boss’s shoulders and the old sweat-stains of the afternoon
showing dark at the armpits. The Judge’s yellow eyes were near to
popping out of his face and the blood was up in his face till it was
the color of calf’s liver in a butcher shop. Then he began to walk
down the hall after the Boss.

I followed the pair of them.

The Boss was already sitting in a big old scuffed leather easy chair
when I went in. I stood there against the wall, under the book-
shelves that went up to the ceiling, full of old leather books, a lot
of them law books, that got lost in the shadows up above and made
the room smell musty like old cheese. Well, the room hadn’t
changed any. I could remember that smell from the long after-
noons I had spent in that room, reading by myself or hearing the
Judge’s voice reading to me, while a log crackled on the hearth and
the clock in the corner, a big grandfather’s clock, offered us the
slow, small, individual pellets of time. It was the same room. There
were the big steel engravings on the wall— by Piranesi, in the heavy,
scrollwork frames, the Tiber, the Colosseum, some ruined temple.
And the riding crops on the mantel and on the desk, and the silver
cups the Judge’s dogs had won in the field trials and the Judge had
won shooting. The gun rack, over in the shadow by the door, was
out of the light from the big brass reading lamp on the desk, but
I knew every gun in it, and knew the gun’s feel.

The Judge didn’t sit down. He stood in the middle of the floor
and looked down at the Boss, who had his legs stuck out on the red
carpet And the Judge didn’t say anything. Something was going on

inside his head. You knew that if he had a little glass window in
the side of that tall skull, where the one-time thick, dark-red, mane-
like hair was tliinned out now and faded, you could see inside and
see the wheels and springs and cogs and ratchets wwking away
and shining like a beautiful lot of well-kept mechanism. But maybe
somebody had pushed the wrong button. Maybe it was just going
to run on and on till something cracked or the spring ran down,
and notliing was going to happen.

But the Boss said something. He jerked his head sideways to in-
dicate the silver tray with the bottle and the pitcher of water and
a silver bowl and two used glasses and three or four clean ones
which sat on the desk, and said, “Ji-^dge, I trust you don’t mind
Jack pouring me a slug? You know. Southern hospitality.”

Judge Irwin didn’t answer him. He turned to me, and said, “I
didn’t realize. Jack, that your duties included those of a body
servant,. but, of course, if I am mistaken—”

I could have slapped his face. I could have slapped that God-
damned handsome, eagle-beaked, strong-boned, rubiginous-hided,
high old face, in which the eyes weren’t old but were hard and
bright without any depth to them and were an insult to look into.
And the Boss laughed, and I could have slapped his God-damned
face. I could have walked right out and left the two of them there,
alone in that cheese-smelling room together till hell froze over, and
just kept on walking. But I didn’t, and perhaps it was just as well,
for maybe you cannot ever really walk away from the things you
want most to walk away from.

”Oh, nuts,” the Boss said, and stopped laughing, and heaved
himself up out of the leather chair, and made a pass at the bottle
and sloshed out some whisky into a glass and poured in some
water. Then he turned round, and grinning up to the Judge,
stepped toward me and held out the glass. “Here, Jack,” he said,
“have a drink.”

I can’t say that I took the drink. It got shoved into my hand, and
I stood there holding it, not drinking it, and watched the Boss look
up at Judge Irwin and say, “Sometimes Jack pours me a drink, and
sometimes I pour him a drink and—” he stepped toward the desk
again— “sometimes I pour myself a drink.”

He poured the drink, added water, and looked again at the
Judge, leering with a kind of comic cunning. “Whether I’m asked
or not,” he said. And added, “There’s lots of things you never get.
Judge, if you wait till you are asked. And I am an impatient man.
I am a very impatient man. Judge. That is why I am not a gentle-
man, Judge.”

•'Really?” replied the Judge. He stood in the middle of the floor
and studied the scene beneath him.

From my spot by the wall, I looked at both of them. To hell with
them, I thought, to hell with both of them, WHien they talked like
that, it was to hell with both of them.

“Yeah;” the Boss was saying, “you’re a gent, and so you don’t ever
get impatient. Not even '‘or your likker. You aren’t even impatient
for your drink right now and it’s likker your money paid for. But
you’ll get a drink, Judge. I’m asking you to have one. Have a drink
with me, Judge.”

Judge Irwin didn’t answer a word. He stood very erect in the
middle of the floor.

“Aw, have a drink,” the Boss said, and laughed, and sat again
in the big chair and stuck out his legs on the red carpet.

The Judge didn’t pour himself a drink. And he didn’t sit down.

The Boss looked up at him from the chair and said, “Judge, you
happen to have an evening paper round here?”

The paper was lying over on another chair by the fireplace, with
the Judge’s collar and tie on top of it, and his white jacket hung on
the back of the chair. I saw the Judge’s eyes snap over there to it,
and then back at the Boss.

“Yes,” the Judge said, “as a matter of fact, I have.”

“I haven’t had a chance to see one, rushing round the country
today. Mind if I take a look?”

“Not in the slightest,” Judge Irwin said, and the sound was the
file scraping on that cold tin again, “but perhaps I can relieve your
curiosity on one point. The paper publishes my endorsement of
Callahan for the Senate nomination. If that is of interest to you.”

“Just wanted to hear you say it, Judge. Somebody told me, but
you know how rumor hath a thousand tongues, and how the news-
paper boys tend to exaggeration, and the truth ain’t in ’em.”

“There was no exaggeration in this case,” the Judge said,

“Just wanted to hear you say it. With your own silver tongue.”

“Well, you’ve heard it,” the Judge said, standing straight in the
middle of the floor, “and in that case, at your leisure—” the Judge’s
face was the color of calf’s liver again, even if the words did come
out cold and spaced— “if you have finished your drink—”

“Why, thanks, Judge,” the Boss said, sweet as chess pie, “I reckon
I will take another spot,” And he heaved himself in the direction
of the bottle.

He did his work, and said, “Thanks.”

When he was back in the leather chair with the fresh load in the
glass, he said, “Yeah, Judge, I’ve heard you say it, but I just wanted

to hear you say something else. Are you sure you took it to the Lord
in prayer? Huh?”

''I have settled the matter in my own mind/' the Judge said.

“Well, if I recollect right—" the Boss ruminatively turned the
glass in his hands— “back in town, when wt had our little talk, you
sort of felt my boy Masters was all right.”

“I made no commitment,” the Judge said sharply. “I didn’t make
any commitment except to my conscience.”

“You been messing in politics a long time, Judge,” the Boss said,
easy, “and—” he took a drag from the glass— “so has your con-
science.”

“I beg your pai'don,” the Judge snapped.

“Nuts,” the Boss said, and grinned. “But what got you off Mas-
ters?”

“Certain features of his career came to my attention.”

“Somebody dug up some dirt for you, huh?”

“If you choose to call it that,” the Judge said.

“Dirt’s a funny thing,” the Boss said. “Come to think of it, there
ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under
water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond
ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot.
And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it
and made you and me and George Washington and mankind
blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do
with the dirt. That right?”

“That doesn’t alter the fact,” the Judge said from way up there
where his head was, above the rays of the desk lamp, “that Masters
doesn’t strike me as a responsible man.”

“He better be responsible,” the Boss said, “or I’ll break his God-
damned neck!”

“That’s die trouble. Masters would be responsible to you.”

“It’s a fact,” the Boss admitted ruefully, lifting his face under
the light, and shaking his head in fatalistic sadness. “Masters’d be
responsible to me. I can’t help it. But Callahan— now take Callahan
—it sort of seems to me he’s gonna be responsible to you and Alta
Power and God knows who else before he’s through. And what’s the
difference? Huh?”

“Well-”

“Well, hell!” The Boss popped straight up in the chair with that
inner explosiveness he had when, all of a sudden, he would snatch
a fly out of the air or whip his head at you and his eyes would snap
open. He popped up and his heels dug into the red carpet. Some of
the liquor sloshed out of his glass onto his Palm Beach pants.

'‘Weil, ril tell you the difference, Judge! 1 can deliver Masters and
you can’t deliver Callahan. And that’s a big difference.”

“I’ll have to take my chance,” the Judge said from way up there.

“Chance?” And the Boss laughed. “Judge,” he said, and quit
laughing, “you haven’t got but one chance. You been guessing right
in this state going on forty years. You been sitting back here in this
room and nigger boys been single-footing in here bringing you
toddies and you been guessing right. You been sitting back here
and grinning to yourself while the rest of ’em were out sweating on
the stump and snapping their suspenders, and when you wanted
anything you just reached out and took it. Oh, if you had a little
time off from duck hunting and corporation law you might do a
hitch as Attorney General. So you did. Or play at being a judge.
You been a judge a long time. How would it feel not to be a judge
any more?”

“No man,” Judge Irwin said, and stood up there straight in the
middle of the floor, “has ever been able to intimidate me.”

“Well, I never tried,” the Boss said, “yet. And I’m not trying now.
I’m going to give you a chance. You say somebody gave you some
dirt on Masters? Well, just suppose I gave you some dirt on Calla-
han?—Oh, don’t interrupt! Keep your shirt on!”— and he held up
his hand. “I haven’t been doing any digging, but I might, and if 1
went out in the barn lot and stuck my shovel in and brought you
in some of the sweet-smelling and put it under the nose of your
conscience, then do you know what your conscience would tell you
to do? It would tell you to withdraw your endorsement of Calla-
han. And the newspaper boys would be over here thicker’n blue-
bottle flies on a dead dog, and you could tell ’em all about you and
your conscience. You wouldn’t even have to back Masters. You and
your conscience could just go off arm in arm and have a fine time
telling each other how much you think of each other.”

“I have endorsed Callahan,” the Judge said. He didn’t flicker.

“I maybe could give you the dirt,” the Boss said speculatively.
“Callahan’s been playing round for a long time, and he who touches
pitch shall be defiled, and little boys just will walk barefoot in the
cow pasture.” He looked up at Judge Irwin’s face, squinting, study-
ing it, cocking his own head to one side.

The grandfather’s clock in the corner of the room, I suddenly
realized, wasn’t getting any younger. It would drop out a tick, and
the tick would land inside my head like a rock dropped in a well,
and the ripples would circle out and stop, and the tick would sink
down the dark. For a piece of time which was not long or short, and
might not even be time, there wouldn’t be anything. Then the

lock would drop down the well, and the ripples would ciicle out
and finish.

The Boss quit studying Judge Irwdn’s face, which didn’t show
anything. He let himself sink back in the chair, shrugged his shoul-
ders, and lilted the glass up for a drink. Then he said, “Suit your*
self, Judge. But you know, there’s another way to play it. Maybe
somebody might give Callahan a little shovelful on somebody else
and Callahan might grow a conscience ail of a sudden and repudi-
ate his endorser. You know, when this conscience business starts,
ain’t no telling where it’ll stop, and when you start the digging—”

“I'll thank you, sir—” Judge Irwin took a step toward the big
chair, and his face wasn’t the color of calf’s liver now— it was long
past that and streaked white back from the base of the jutting nose
—“I’ll thank you, sir, to get out of that chair and get out of this
housel”

The Boss didn’t lift his head off the leather. Ho looked up at the
Judge, sweet and trusting, and then cocked his eyes over to me,
“Jack,” he said, “you were sure right. The Judge don’t scare easy.”

“Get out,” the Judge said, not loud this time.

“These old bones don’t move fast,” the Boss murmured sadly,
“but now I have tried to do my bounden duty, let me go.” Then
he drained his glass, set it on the floor beside the chair, and rose.
He stood in front of the Judge, looking up at him, squinting again,
cocking his head to one side again, like a farmer getting ready to
buy a horse.

I set my glass on the shelf of the bookcase behind me. I discovered
that I hadn’t touched it, not since the first sip. Well, to hell with it,
I thought, and let it stand. Some nigger boy would get it in the
morning.

Then, as though he had decided against buying the horse, the
Boss shook his head and passed around the Judge, as though the
Judge weren’t a man at all, or even a horse, as though he were the
corner of a house or a tree, and headed for the hall door, putting
his feet down slow and easy on the red carpet. No hurry.

For a second or two the Judge didn’t even move his head; then
he swung round and watched the Boss going toward the door, and
his eyes glittered up there in the shadow above the lamp.

The Boss laid his hand on the doorknob, opened the door, and
then, with his hand still on the knob, he looked back. “Well,
Judge,” he said, “more in pain than wrath I go. And if your con-
science decides it could gag at Callahan, just let me know. In, of
course—*’ and he grinned— “a reasonable time.”

Then he looked over at me and said, “Let’s haul ass. Jack,” and
started on down toward the front door, out of sight.

Before I could get into low gear, the Judge s\vmng his face in my
direction, and focused his eyes on me, and his upper lip lifted un-
der that nose to form a smile of somewhat massive irony, and he
said, “Your employer is calling you, Mr. Burden.”

“I don’t use any ear trumpet yet,” I said, and pulled off toward
the door, and thought to myself: Christy Jack, you talk like a snot,
Christ, you are a smart guy,

I had just about made the door, when he said, “Fm dining with
your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?”

Why won't he lay off? I thought, but he wouldn’t, and that lip
lifted up again.

So I said, “Suit yourself. Judge. But if I were you I wouldn’t go
around advertising this visit to anybody. In case you changed your
mind, somebody might figure you had stooped to a low political
deal with the Boss. In the dark of night.”

And I went out the door and down the hall and out the hall door
and left it open but let the screen door slam.

God damn him, why hadn't he laid off me?

But he hadn’t scared.

We left the bay, and lost the salt, sad, sweet, fishy smell of the
tidelands out of our nostrils. We headed north again. It was darker
now. The ground mist lay heavier on the fields, and in the dips of
the road the mist frayed out over the slab and blunted the head-
lights. Now and then a pair of eyes would burn at us out of the
dark ahead. I knew that they were the eyes of a cow— a poor dear
stoic old cow with a cud, standing on the highway shoulder, for
there wasn’t any stock iaw—but her eyes burned at us out of the
dark as though her skull were full of blazing molten metal like
blood and we could see inside the skull into that bloody hot bright-
ness in that moment when the reflection was right before we picked
up her shape, which is so perfectly formed to be pelted with clods,
and knew what she was and knew that inside that unlovely knotty
head there wasn’t anything but a handful of coldly coagulated gray
mess in which something slow happened as we went by. We were
something slow happening inside the cold brain of a cow. That’s
what the cow would say if she were a brass-bound Idealist like little
Jackie Burden.

The Boss said, “Well, Jackie, it looks like you got a job cut out
for you.”

And I said, “Callahan?”

And he said, “Nope, Irwin.”

And I said, “I don’t reckon you will find anything on Irwin.”

And he said, “You find it.”

We bored on into the dark for another twenty miles and eighteen
minutes. The ectoplasmic fingers of the mist reached out of the
swamp, threading out from the blackness of the cypresses, to snag
us, but didn’t have any luck. A possum came out of the swamp and
started across the road and might have made it, too, if Sugar-Boy
hadn’t been too quick for him. Sugar-Boy just shaded the steering
wheel delicately to the left, just a fraction. There wasn’t even a
jounce or twitch, but something thumped against the underside of
the left front fender, and Sugar-Boy said, “The b-b-b-b-bas-tud.”
Sugar-Boy could thread a needle with that Cadillac.

At about the end of that eighteen minutes and twenty miles, I
said: “But suppose I don’t find anything before election day?”

The Boss said, “To hell with election day. I can deliver Masters
prepaid, special handling. But if it takes ten years, you find it.”

We clocked off five miles more, and I said, “But suppose there
isn’t anything to find?”

And the Boss said, “There is always something.”

And I said, “Maybe not on the Judge.”

And he said, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption
and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the
shroud. There is always something.”

Two miles more, and he said, “And make it stick.”

And that was all a good while ago. And Masters is dead now, as
dead as a mackerel, but the Boss was right and he went to the
Senate. And Callahan is not dead but he has wished he were, no
doubt, for he used up his luck a long time back and being dead was
not part of it. And Adam Stanton is dead now, too, who used to
go fishing with me and who lay on the sand in the hot sunshine
with me and with Anne Stanton. And Judge Irwin is dead, who
leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in
the gray damp wintry dawn, and said, “You ought to have led that
duck more. Jack, You got to lead a duck, son.” And the Boss is
dead, who said to me, “And make it stick*”

Little Jackie made it stick, all right.

Chapter Two

THE LAST time I saw Mason City I went up there in that big black
Cadillac with the Boss and the gang, and we burned up that new
concrete slab, and it was a long time ago— nearly three years, for it
is now into 1939, but it seems like forever. But the first time I went
up there it was a lot longer time ago, back in 1922, and I went up
there in my Model-T, hanging on to the steering post to stay in the
saddle when I sideslipped in the gray dust, which plumed out be*
hind for a mile and settled on the cotton leaves to make them gray
too, or when I hit a section of gravel, holding my jaws clamped
tight to keep the vibration from the washboard from chipping the
enamel off my teeth. You'll have to say this for the Boss: when he got
through you could drive out for a breath of air and still keep your
bridgework in place. But you couldn't that first time I went to
Mason City.

The managing editor of the Chronicle called me in and said,
‘‘Jack, get in your car and go up to Mason City and see who the
hell that fellow Stark is who thinks he is Jesus Christ scourging the
money-changers out of that shinplaster courthouse up there."

“He married a school-teacher," I said.

“Well, it must have gone to his head," Jim Madison, who was
managing editor of the Chronicle, said. “Does he think he is the
first one ever popped a school-teacher?"

“The bond issue was for building a schoolhouse," I said, “and
it looks like Lucy figures they might keep some of it for that pur-
pose."

“Who the hell is Lucy?"

“Lucy is the school-teacher," I said.

“She won't be a scliool-teacher long," he said. “Not on the Mason
County payroll if she keeps that up. Not if I know Mason County."

“Lucy don't favor drinking either,” I said.

‘Was it you or the other guy popped Lucy?" he demanded. “You
know so much about Lucy."

*1 just knov7 what Willie told me/’

‘‘Who the hell is Willie?”

“Willie is the fellow ivith the Christmas tie/’ I said. “He is
Cousin Willie from the country. He is Willie Stark, the teacher’s
pet, and I met him in the back room of Slade’s place a couple of
months ago and he told me Lucy didn’t favor drinking. I’m just
guessing about her not favoring stealing.”

“She don’t favor Willie being County Treasurer either,” Jim
Madison allowed, “if she is the one putting him up to w^hat he is
doing. Doesn’t she know how they run things up in Mason
County?”

“They run ’em up there just like they run ’em down here,” I
said.

“Yeah,” Jim Madison said, and took the foul, chewed, and spit-
bright butt of what had been a two-bit cigar out of the corner of
his mouth and inspected it and reached out at arm’s length and let
it fall into the big brass spittoon which stood on the clover-deep,
Kell) -green carpet which bloomed like an oasis of elegance in the
four floors of squalor of the Chronicle Building. He watched it fall,
and said again, “Yeah, but you leave down here and go on up
there.”

So I went up to Mason City in the Model-T, and kept my jaws
damped tight when I went over the washboard and hung to the
steering post when I went over the sideslipping dust, and that was
a very long time ago.

I got to Mason City early in the afternoon and went to the
Mason City Cafe, Home-Cooked Meals for Ladies and Gents, facing
the square, and sampled the mashed potatoes and fried ham and
greens with pot-likker with one hand while with the other I com-
peted with seven or eight flies for the possession of a piece of cus-
tard pie.

I went out into the street, w^here the dogs lay on the shady side
under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the block till
I came to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat out front, so
I said howdy-do, and joined the club. I was the junior member by
forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver spots on my
swollen old hands crooked on the head of the hickory stick like the
rest of them before anybody was going to say anything. In a town
like Mason City the bench in front of the harness shop is— or was
twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down— the place
where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old
hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down
and wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is the place the

local undertaker looks at with confidence and tliinks he is not
^oing to starve as long as that much work is cut out for him. But
i[ )ou are sitting on the bench in the middle of the afternoon in
kue August with the old ones, it does not seem that anything will
t\er come, not even your own funeral, and the sun beats down and
il.e shadows don’t move across the bright dust, which, if you stare
at it long enough, seems to be full of glittering specks like quartz.
The old ones sit there with their liver-spotted hands crooked on
the hickory sticks, and they emit a kind of metaphysical effluvium
by ^'irtue of which your categories are altered. Time and motion
cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad
and far away. You sit there among the elder gods, disturbed by no
sound except the slight rale of the one who has asthma, and wait
for them to lean from the Olympian and sunlit detachment and
comment, with their unenvious and foreknowing irony, on the
goings-on of the folks who are still snared in the toils of mortal
compulsions. I seen Sim Saunders done built him a new bam.
Then, Yeah, some folks thinks they is made of money. And, Yeah.

So I sat tliere and waited. And one of them said it, and another
one leaned and shifted the quid and answered, and the last one
said, “Yeah.” Then I waited again for a spell, for I knew my place
in the picture, and then I said, “They tell me there’s gonna be a
new schoolhouse.” Then I waited another spell while the words
died away and it was as though I hadn’t said anything. Then one
of them let the ambeer drop to the dry ground, and touched the
spot with the end of the hickory stick, and said, “Yeah, and steam
heat, hear tell.”

And Number Two: “Give them young ’uns pneumony, steam
heat.”

And Number Three: “Yeah.”

And Number Four: “If n they git hit built.”

I looked across the square at the painted clock face on the courts
house tower, which was the clock the old ones kept time by, and
waited. Then I said, “What’s stopping ’em?”

And Number One: “Stark. Thet Stark.”

And Number Two: “Yeah, thet Willie Stark.”

And Number Three: “Too big fer his britches. Gits in the court-
house and gits his front feet in the trough, and gits too big fer his
britches.”

And Number Four: “Yeah.”

I waited, then I said, “Wants ’em to take the low bid, they tell

me.”

And Number One: “Yeah, wants ’em to take the low bid and
git a passel of niggers in here/’

And Number Two: “To put white folks out of work. Builden
hit.”

And Number Three: “You want to work longside a nigger? And
specially him a strange nigger? Builden schoolhouse or backhouse,
how so be hit?”

And Number Four: “And white folks needen work.”

And Number One: “Yeah.”

Yeah^ I said to myself, so that is the tale, for Mason County is
red-neck country and they don’t like niggers, not strange niggers
anyway, and they haven’t got many of their own. “How much
could they save,” I asked, “taking the low bid?”

And Number One: “Couldn’t save enuff to pay fer bringen no
passel of niggers in here.”

“Putten white folks out of work,” Number Two said.

I waited till it was decent, then I got up and said, “Got to be
moving. Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

One of the old ones looked up at me as though I had just come,
and said, “What you work at, boy?”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Porely?” he asked.

“Not porely,” I said. “It is just I lack ambition.”

Which was God’s truth, I reckoned, as I walked on down the
street.

I reckoned, too, that I had killed enough time and I might as
well go on to the courthouse and get my story in the way I was sup-
posed to get it. All this sitting around in front of harness shops was
not the way any newspaperman would go about getting his story.
There isn’t ever anything you get that way which you can put into
a newspaper. So I went on over to the courthouse.

Inside the courthouse, where the big hall was empty and shadowy
and the black oily floor was worn down to humps and ridges under
your feet and the air was dry and dusty so that you felt in the still-
ness that you were breathing into yourself the last shrunk-up whis
pers still hanging in the air from all the talk, loud and little, there
had been in there for seventy-five years— well, inside there, just off
the hall I saw some men sitting in a room. Above the doorway there
was a tin sign with the letters about faded off. But they still said
Sheriff,

I went into the room where the three men were cocked back in
split-bottom chairs and an electric fan set on top of the roll-top
desk was burring away with little effect, and said howdy-do to the

faces. The biggest face, which was round and red and had its feet
cocked on the desk and its hands laid on its stomach, said howdy-do.

I took a card out of my pocket and gave it to him. He looked at
the card for a minute, holding it off near arm’s length as though
he were afraid it would spit in his e)e, then he turned it over and
looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank.
Then he laid the hand with the card in it back down on his
stomach, where it belonged, and looked at me. 'You done come a
piece,” he said.

"That’s right,” I said.

"What you come fer?”

"To see what’s going on about the schoolhouse,” I said.

"You come a piece,” he said, "to stick yore nose in somebody
else’s bizness.”

"That’s right,” I agreed cheerfully, "but my boss on the paper
can’t see it that way.”

"It ain’t any of his bizness either.”

"No,” I said, "but what’s the ruckus about, now I’ve come all
that piece?”

"It ain’t any of my bizness. I’m the Sheriff.”

"Weil, Sheriff,” I said, "whose business is it?”

"Them as is tending to it. If folks would quit messen and let
’em.”

"Who is them?''

"Commissioners,” the Sheriff said. "The County Commissioners,
the voters of Mason County done elected to tend to their bizness
and not take no butten-in from nobody.”

"Yeah, sure— the Commissioners. But who are they?”

The Sheriff’s little wise eyes blinked at me a couple of times, then
he said, "The constable ought to lock you up fer vagruncy.”

"Suits me,” I said. "And the Chronicle would send up another
boy to cover my case, and when the constable pinched him the
Chronicle would send up another one to cover that case, and after
a while you’d get us all locked up. But it might get in the papers.”

The Sheriff just lay there, and out of his big round face his little
eyes blinked. Maybe I hadn’t said anything. Maybe I wasn’t there.

"Who are the Commissioners?” I said. "Or maybe they are hid-
ing out?”

"One of ’em is setten right there,” the Sheriff said, and rolled his
big round head on his shoulders to indicate one of the other fel-
lows. When the head had fallen back into place, and his fingers
had let go my card, which wafted down to the floor in the gentle
breeze from the fan, the little eyes blinked again and he seemed to

sink below the surface of the roiled waters. He had done his best,
and now he had passed the bail.

**Are you a Commissioner?’' I asked the fellow just indicated. He
was just another fellow, made in God’s image and wearing a white
shirt with a ready-tied black bow tie and jean pants held up with
web galluses. Town from the waist up, country from the waist
down. Get both votes.

“Yeah,” he said.

“He’s the head man,” another fellow said, reverently, a little old
squirt of a fellow with a bald knotty old head and a face he him-
self couldn’t recollect from one time he looked in the mirror to the
next, the sort of a fellow who hangs around and sits in a chair when
the big boys leave one vacant and tries to buy his way into the game
with a remark like the one he had just made.

“You the Chairman?” I asked the other fellow.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You mind telling me your name?”

“It ain’t no secret,” he said. “It is Dolph Pillsbury.”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Pillsbury,” I said and held out my hand.
Not getting up, he took it as though I had offered him the business
end of a cottonmouth moccasin in shedding time.

“Mr. Pillsbury,” I said, “you are in a position to know the situa-
tion in regard to the schoolhouse contract. No doubt you are in
terested in having the truth of that situation made public.”

“There ain’t any situation,” Mr. Pillsbury said.

“Maybe there isn’t any situation,” I said, “but there’s been a
right smart racket.”

“Ain’t any situation. Board meets and takes a bid what’s been
offered. J. H. Moore’s bid, the fellow’s name.”

“Was that fellow Moore’s bid low?”

“Not egg-zackly.”

“You mean it wasn’t low?”

“Well—” Mr. Pillsbury said, and his face was shadowed by an ex-
pression which might have been caused by a gas pain, “well, if’rv
you want to put it that a-way.”

“All right,” I said, “let’s put it that way.”

“Now look a-here— ” and the shadow passed from Mr. Pillsbury’s
face and he sat up in his chair as suddenly as though he had been
stuck by a pin— “you talk like that, and ain’t nuthen done but
legal. Ain’t nobody can tell the Board what bid to take. Anybody
can come along and put in a little piss-ant bid, but the Board doan
have to take it. Naw-sir-ee. The Board takes somebody kin do the
work right,”

*‘Who was it put the little piss-ant bid in?”

“Name of Jeffers,” Mr. Pillsbury said peevishly, as at an un-
pleasant recollection.

“Jeffers Construction?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“W^hat’s ^\Tong with Jeffers Construction?”

“The Board picks the fellow kin do the work right, and it ain’t
nobody’s bizness.”

I took out my pencil and a pad of paper, and wTOte on it. Then
I said to Mr. Pillsbury, “How’s this?” And I began to read to him;
“Mr. Dolph Pillsbury, Chairman of the Board of County Commis-
sioners of Mason County, stated that the bid of J. H. Moore for the
construction of the Mason County School was accepted, even
though it was not the low bid, because the Board wanted somebody
‘who could do the work right.’ The low bid, which was submitted
by the Jeffers Construction Company, was rejected, Mr. Pillsbury
stated. Mr. Pillsbury stated further—”

“Now look a-here— ” Mr. Pillsbury was sitting very straight up as
though it were not a pin this time but a hot tenpenny and in the
brown— “now look a-here, I didn’t state nuthen. You write it down
and claim I stated it. Now you look a-here—”

The Sheriff heaved massively in the chair and fixed his gaze upon
Mr. Pillsbury. “Dolph,” he said, “tell the bugger to git out of here.”

“I didn’t state nuthen,” Dolph said, “and you git out!”

“Sure,” I said, and put the pad in my pocket, “but maybe you
can kindly tell me where Mr. Stark is?”

“I knowed it,” the Sheriff exploded and dropped his feet off the
desk with a noise like a brick chimney falling, and heaved up in
the chair and glared apoplectically at me. “That Stark, I knowed it
was that Starkl”

“What’s wrong with Stark?” I asked.

“Jesus GawdI” roared the Sheriff, and his face went purple with
the congestion of language which couldn’t get out.

“He’s biggety, that’s what be is,” Mr, Dolph Pillsbury offered.
“Gits in the courthouse and gits biggety, he—”

“He’s a nigger-lover,” the little old bald, knotty-headed fellow
submitted.

“And him, him—” Mr. Pillsbury pointed at me with an air of
revelation— “I bet he’s a nigger-lover, comen up here and sashayen
round, I bet he^”

“No sale,” I said. “I like mine vanilla. But now you’ve raised the
subject, what’s nigger-loving got to do with it?”

“That’s it!” Mr. Pillsbury exclaimed, like the man overboard
seizing the plank, “That Jeffers Construction now, they—”

“You, Dolph,” the Sheriff bellowed at him, “why don’t you shut
up and tell him to git out!”

“Git out,” Mr. Pillsbury said to me, obediently but without great
vigor.

“Sure,” I replied, and went out and walked down the hall.

They ain't real, I thought as I walked down the hail, nary one.
But I knew tlrey were. You come into a strange place, into a town
like Mason City, and they don’t seem real, but you know they are.
You know they went wading in the creek when they were kids, and
when they were bigger they used to go out about sunset and lean
on the back fence and look across the country at the sky and not
know what was happening inside them or whether they were happy
or sad, and when they got gi'own they slept with their wives and
tickled their babies to make them laugh and went to work in the
morning and didn’t know v/hat they wanted but had their reasons
for doing things and wanted to do good things, because they always
gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got
old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench
in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other
people had but had forgotten what the reasons were. And then they
will lie in bed some morning just before day and look up at the
ceiling they can scarcely see because the lamp is shaded with a
pinned-on newspaper and they don’t recognize the faces around the
bed any more because the room is full of smoke, or fog, and it
makes their eyes burn and gets in the throat. Oh, they are real, all
right, and it may be the reason they don’t seem real to you is that
you aren’t very real yourself.

But by that time I was standing in front of a door at one end of
the cross hall and was looking up at another tin sign, and knew
from it that I had arrived at the one-man leper colony of Mason
City.

The leper was sitting in the room, not doing anything, all by
himself. There wasn’t anybody to sit and spit and jaw with him
under his electric fan.

“Hello,” I said, and he looked up at me as though I were a spook
and the word I had used were in a foreign language. He didn’t
answer me right off, and I figured he was like one of those fellows
who gets marooned on a desert island for twenty years and when
the longboat is beached and the jolly tars leap out on the sand and
ask him who the hell he is, he can’t say a word because his tongue
is so rusty.

Well, Willie wasn’t that bad off, for he final!} managed to say
hello, and that he remembered me from our meeting in Slade's
place a few months back, and to ask me what I wanted, I told him,
and he grinned a grin more wistful than happy and asked me why
I wanted to know.

“The editor told me to find out,” I said, “and why he wants me
to find out only God knows. Maybe it is because it is news.”

That seemed to be enough to satisfy him. So I didn’t tell him
that beyond my boss the managing editor there was a great high
world of reasons but to a fellow like me dowm in the ditch it was
a world of flickering diaphanous spirit wings and faint angel voices
I didn’t always savvy^ and stellar influences.

“I reckon it is news,” Willie allowed.

“What’s been going on around here?”

“I don’t mind telling you,” he said. He began telling me and he
finished telling me about eleven o’clock that night with Lucy Stark,
after she had put the kid to bed, and me sitting with him in the
parlor out at his pappy’s place, where he had asked me to spend the
night, and where he and Lucy ordinarily lived in the summer and
where they were going to live that winter too instead of in a room
in town because Lucy had just been fired from her teaching Job for
the coming year and there wasn’t any reason to be in town and be
spending good money for rent. And there was very likely to be an-
other reason for there not being any reason to stay in town, for
Willie was coming up for re-election and his chances looked about
as good as the chances of a flea making a living off a carved marble
lion on a monument. He had only got the job in the first place, he
told me, because Doiph Pillsbury, the Chairman of the Board of
County Commissioners, was a sort of secondhand relative of old
Mr. Stark, by marriage or something, and Pillsbury had had a fall-
ing-out with the other fellow who wanted to be Treasurer. Pills-
bury about ran the county, he and the Sheriff, and he was sick of
Willie. So Willie was on his way out, and Lucy was already out.

“And I don’t care if I am,” Lucy Stark said, sitting there in the
parlor, sewing by the lamp on the table where the big Bible and
the plush-bound album were. *T don’t care a bit if they won’t let
me teach any more. I taught six years, counting that term I was out
and having little Tommie, and nobody ever said I wasn’t all right,
but now they write me a letter and say there’re complaints about
my work and I don’t show a spirit of co-operation.”

She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women
do to make your flesh crawl. When she leaned over, the light hit
her hair to show up the auburn luster lurking in the brown which

the operator of the recently established Mason City Beauty Shoppe
hadn't been entirely able to burn out with the curling tongs when
she gave the marcel treatment. It -was too bad about Lucy's hair,
even if the luster was still there. She was still girlish then, about
twenty-five but not looking it, with a nice little waist coming
straight up out of the satisfactory and unmeager hips and a nice
little pair of ankles crossed in front of the chair, and her face was
girlish, with soft, soothing contours and large deep-brown eyes, the
kind that makes you think of telling secrets in the gloaming over
a garden gate when the lilacs are in bloom along the picket fence of
the old homestead. But her hair was cut off at about neck level and
marcelled the way they did it back then, which was a shame because
the face she had was the kind that demanded to be framed by a
wealth of long and lustrous-dusky tresses tangled on the snow-
white pillow. She must have had plenty of hair, too, before the
massacre.

“But I don’t care,” she said, and lifted her head out of the light.
“I don't want to teach in a schoolhouse they build just so somebody
can steal some money. And Willie doesn’t want to be Treasmrer
either, if he has to associate with those dishonest people.”

“I'm going to run,” Willie said glumly. “They can’t keep me
from running.”

“You can give a lot more time to studying )our law books,” she
said to him, “when you aren't in town all the time.”

“I'm going to run/’ he repeated, and jerked his head with that
sharp motion he had to get the lock of hair out of his eyes, “I'm
going to run,” he repeated again, as though he weren’t talking to
Lucy, or to me, but to the wide sweet air or God-Almighty, “if
I don't get a single God-damned vote.”

Well, he did run when the time came, and he got more than one
vote, but not many more, and Mr. Dolph Pillsbury and his pals
won that round. The fellow who was elected against Willie that
fall didn’t hang his hat up in the office before he had signed the
check for the advance payment to J. H. Moore, and J. H. Moore
built the schoolhouse. But that is getting ahead of the story.

The story, as Willie told it, was this: The Jeffers Construction
Company had low bid at one hundred and forty-two thousand. But
there were two more bids in between the Jeffers bid and the Moore
bid, which was one hundred and sixty-five thousand and a lot of
nickels and dimes. But when Willie kicked about the Moore busi-
ness, Pillsbury started the nigger business. Jeffers was a big-time
contractor, from the south of the state, and he used a lot of Negro
bricklayers and plasterers and carpenters in some of his crews. Pills-

bury started howling that Jeffers would bring in a lot of Negroes—
and Mason County, as I said, is red-neck country— and worse, some
of the Negroes would be getting better pay, being skilled laborers,
than the men he would pick up around Mason City for some of the
work. Pillsbury kept the pot boiling.

He kept it boiling so well that the public overlooked the fact that
there were two bids in between Jeffers and Moore and the fact that
Pillsbury had a brother-in-law who had a brickkiln in which Moore
had an interest and that in the not distant past a lot of the bricks
had been declared rotten by the building inspector on a state job
and had been refused and there had been a lawsuit and that as sure
as God made little green apples with worms in them, bricks from
that same kiln would be used in the schoolhouse. The kiln owned
by Moore and Piilsbury's brother-in-law used convict labor from
the state pen and got it cheap, for the brother-in-law had some tie
well up in the system. In fact, as I picked up later, the tie was so
good that that building inspector who squawked about the bricks
on the state job got thrown out, but I never knew whether he was
honest or just ill-informed.

Willie didn’t have any luck bucking Pillsbury and the Sheriff.
There was an anti-Pillsbury faction, but it didn’t amount to much,
and Willie didn’t add to its numbers. Willie went out and button-
holed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You
could see Willie standing on a street corner, sweating through his
seersucker suit, with his hair down in his eyes, holding an old en-
velope in one hand and a pencil in the other, working out figures
to explain what he was squawking about, but folks don’t listen to
you when your voice is low and patient and you stop them in the
hot sun and make them do arithmetic. Willie tried to get the Mason
County Messenger to print something, but they wouldn’t. Then he
wrote up a long statement of the case as he saw it about the bids,
and tried to get the Messenger to print it on handbills in their job-
printing shop, paid for, but they wouldn’t do it. So Willie had to
go to the city to get the work done. He came back with his hand-
bills and hired a couple of kids to tote them from house to house
in town. But the folks of one of the kids made him stop as soon as
they found out, and when the other kid didn’t stop, some big boys
beat him up.

So Willie toted them around himself, over town, from house to
house, carrying them in an old satchel, the kind school kids use,
and knocked on the door and then tipped his hat when the lady of
the house came. But most of the time she didn’t come. There’d be
a rustle of a window shade inside, but nobody would come. So

Willie would stick a handbill under the door and go to the next
place. When he had worked out Mason City, he went over to Tyi'ee.
the other town in the county, and passed out his bills the same way,
and then he called on the crossroads settlements.

He didn’t dent the constituency. The other fellow was elected.
J. H. Moore built the schoolhouse, which began to need repairs be-
fore the paint was dry. Willie was out of a job. Piilsbury and his
friends, no doubt, picked up some nice change as kickback from
J. H. Moore, and forgot about the whole business. At least they
forgot about it for about three years, when their bad luck started.

Meanwhile Willie was back on Pappy’s farm, helping with the
chores, and peddling a patent Fix-It Household Kit around the
country to pick up a little change, working from door to door again,
going from settlement to settlement in his old car, and stopping at
the farmhouses in between, knocking on the door and tipping his
hat and then showing the woman how to fix a pot. And at night he
was plugging away at his books, getting ready for the bar examina-
tion. But before that came to pass Willie and Lucy and I sat there
that night in tlie parlor, and Willie said: “They tried to run it over
me. They just figured I’d do anything they told me, and they tried
to run it over me like I was dirt.’’

And laying her sewing down in her lap, Lucy said, “Now, honey,
you didn’t want to be mixed up with them anyway. Not after you
found out they were dishonest and crooked.’’

“They tried to run it over me,’’ he repeated, sullenly, twisting his
heavy body in the chair. “Like I was dirt.’’

“Willie,” she said, leaning toward him a little, “they would have
been crooks even if they didn’t try to run it over you.”

He wasn’t paying her much mind.

“They’d be crooks, wouldn’t they?” she asked in a tone which
was a little bit like the patient, leading-them-on tone she must have
used in the schoolroom. She kept watching his face, which seemed
to be pulling back from her and from me and the room, as though
he weren’t really hearing her voice but were listening to another
voice, a signal maybe, outside the house, in the dark beyond the
screen of the open window.

“Wouldn’t they?” she asked him, pulling him back into the room,
into the circle of soft light from the lamp on the table, where the
big Bible and the plush-bound album lay. The bowl of the lamp
was china and had a spray of violets painted on it.

“Wouldn’t they?” she asked him, and before he answered I caught
myself listening to the dry, compulsive, half-witted sound the crick-
ets were making out in the grass in the dark.

Then he said, “Yeah, yeah, they’d be crooks, ali right,” and
heaved himself in the chair with the motion of one who is irritated
at having a train of thought interrupted.

Then he sank back into whatever he was brooding over.

Lucy looked at me with a confident birdlike lift of her head, as
though she had proved something to me. The secondary glow of
the light above the circle of light was on her face, and if I had
wanted to I could have guessed that some of that glow was given
off softly by her face as though the flesh had a delicate and unflag-
ging and serene phosphorescence from its own inwardness.

Well, Lucy was a woman, and therefore she must have been won-
derful in the way women are wonderful. She turned her face to me
with that expression which seemed to say, “See, I told you, that’s
the way it is,” and meanwhile Willie sat there. But his own face
seemed to be pulling off again into the distance which was not dis-
tance but which was, shall I say, simply himself.

Lucy was sewing now, and taking to me while looking down at
the cloth, and after a little Willie got up and started to walk up
and down the room, with his forelock coming down over his eyes.
He kept on pacing back and forth while Lucy and I talked.

It wasn’t very soothing to have that going on across one end of
the room.

Finally, Lucy looked up from her sewing, and said, “Honey—”

Willie stopped pacing and swung his head at her with the fore-
lock down over his eyes to give him the look of a mean horse when
he’s cornered in the angle of the pasture fence with his head down
a little and the mane shagged forward between the ears, and the
eyes both wild and shrewd, watching you step up with the bridle,
and getting ready to bolt.

“Sit down, honey,” Lucy said, “you make me nervous. You’re just
like Tommie, you can’t ever sit still.” Then she laughed, and with
a sort of shamefaced grin on his face he came over and sat down.

She was a fine woman, and he was lucky to have her.

But he was also lucky to have the Sheriff and Dolph Pillsbury,
for they were doing him a favor and not knowing it. He didn’t
seem to know it either at the time, that they were his luck. But per-
haps the essential part of him was knowing it all the time, only
word hadn’t quite got around to the other and accidental parts of
him. Or it is possible that fellows like Willie Stark are bom outside
of luck, good or bad, and luck, which is what about makes you and
me what we are, doesn’t have anything to do with them, for they
are what they are from the time they first kick in the womb until
the end. And if that is the case, then their life history is a process

of discovering what tiiey really are, and not, as for you and me,
sons of luck, a process of becoming what luck makes us. And if that
is the case, then Lucy wasn't Willie's luck. Or his uniuck either.
She was part of the climate in which the process of discovering the
real Willie was taking place.

But, speaking vulgarly, tlie Sheriff and Pillsbury were part of
Willie’s luck. I didn’t know it that night in Pappy's parlor, and I
didn’t know it when I got back to towm and gave Jim Madison my
tale. Well, Willie began to appear in the Chronicle in the role of
the boy upon the burning deck and the boy w^ho put his finger in
the dike and the boy who replies ''I can” when Duty whispers low
“Thou must.” The Chronicle was turning up more and more tales
about finagling in county courthouses around the state. It pointed
the finger of fine scorn and reprobation all over the map. Then I
began to grasp the significance of what was going on in that world
of reasons high above the desk of Jim Madison, and caught the
glint of those diaphanous spirit wings and the fluting whispers of
the faint angel voices up there. In brief, this: The happy harmony
in the state machine was a thing of the past, and the Chronicle was
lined up with the soreheads, and was hacking away at the county
substructure of the machine. It was starting there, feeling its way,
setting the stage and preparing the back-drop for the real show. It
wasn’t as hard as it might have been. Ordinarily the country boys
in the county courthouses have plenty of savvy and know all the
tricks and are plenty hard to pin anything on, but the machine had
been operating so long now without serious opposition that ease
had corrupted them. They just didn’t bother to be careful. So the
Chronicle was making a good show.

But Mason County was Exhibit Number One. On account of
Willie. He gave the touch of drama to the sordid tale. He became
symbolically the spokesman for the tongue-tied population of
honest men. And when Willie was licked at the polls of Mason
County, the Chronicle ran his picture, and under it the line keeps
HIS FAITH. And under that they printed the statement which Willie
had given to me when I went back up to Mason City after the elec-
tion and after Willie was out. The statement went like this:

“Sure, tliey did it and it was a clean job which I admire. I am
going back to Pappy’s farm and milk the cows and study some more
law for it looks like I am going to need it. But I have kept my faith
in the people of Mason County, Time will bring all things to
light.”

I had gone up there to see what he had to say, but didn’t have to
go out to the farm. I ran into Willie on the street. He had been

building some fence and had busted his wire stretcher and had
come in to town to get a new one. He was wearing an old black
felt hat and overalls which hung down around his can as though he
were little Droopy-Drawers smiling up from the play pen.

We went to the drugstore and had a coke. We stood in front of
the soda fountain and I put my pad in front of Willie by his old
hat and gave him a pencil. He licked the point and his eyes glazed
as though he were getting ready to do sums on his slate, and then
leaning up against the marble, with his overalls drooping, he wrote
out tlie statement in his big round, scrawly hand.

“How’s Lucy making out?” I asked him.

“Fine,” he said. “She likes it out there and she’s company for
Pappy. It suits her all right.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“It suits me, too,” he said, not looking at me but across the foun-
tain at his own face in the big mirror. “The way it is it all suits me
just fine,” he said, and looked at the face in the mirror, which was
freckled and thin-skinned over the full flesh but under the shaggy
forelock was untroubled and pure like the face of a man who tops
the last rise and looks down at the road running long and straight
to the place where he is going.

As I said, if a man like Willie can be said to live in the world
of luck, Dolph Pillsbury and the Sheriff were his luck. They ran it
over Willie and got the new schoolhouse built by J. H. Moore. J,
H. Moore used the brick out of the kiln owned by the distant rela-
tive of Pillsbury. It was just another big box of a schoolhouse with
a fire escape at each end. The fire escapes weren’t the kind which
looks like a silo and which has a corkscrew-shaped chute inside for
the kiddies to slide down. They were iron stairs attached to the
outside of the building.

There wasn’t any fire at the schoolhouse. There was just a fire
drill.

About two years after the place was built, it happened. There
was a fire drill, and all the kids on the top floors started to use the
fire escapes. The first kids to start down on the fire escape at the
west end were little kids and they couldn’t get down the steps very
fast. Right after them came a batch of big kids, seventh and eighth
graders. Because the little kids held up the traffic, the fire escape
and the iron platform at the top got packed with kids. Well, some
of the brickwork gave and the bolts and bars holding the contrap-
tion to the wall pulled loose and the whole thing fell away, sprayp-
ing kids in all directions.

Three kids were killed outright. They were the ones that hit tht
concrete walk. About a dozen were crippled up pretty seriously and
several of those never were much good afterward.

It was a piece of luck for Willie.

Willie didn’t try to cash in on the luck. He didn’t have to try.
People got the point. Willie went to the triple funeral the town
had for the kids who got killed, and stood modestly in the back-
ground. But old Mr. Sandeen, who was father of one of the dead
kids, saw him back in the arowd and while the clods were still
bouncing off the coffin lids Mr. Sandeen pushed back to him and
grabbed him by the hand and lifted up one arm above his head
and said, loud, “Oh, God, I am punished for accepting iniquity
and voting against an honest man!”

It brought down the house. Some women began to cry. Then
other people began to come up and grab Willie by the hand. Pretty
soon there was scarcely a dry eye in the crowd. Willie’s weren’t dry,
either.

It was Willie’s luck. But the best luck always happens to people
who don’t need it.

He had Mason County in the palm of his hand. And in the city
his picture was in all die papers. But he didn’t run for anything.
He kept on working on his father’s farm and studying his law books
at night. The only thing he did about politics was to get out and
make some speeches for a fellow who was running in the primar^^
against the Congressman who had always been a pal of Pillsbury..
Willie’s speeches weren’t any good, at least the one I heard wasn’t
any good. But they didn’t have to be good. People didn’t bother tc
listen to them. They just came to look at Willie and clap and then
go vote against the Pillsbury man.

Then one day Willie woke up and found himself running for
Governor. Or rather, he was running in the Democratic primary,
which in our state is the same as running for Governor.

Now it wasn’t any particular achievement to be running in the
primary. Anybody who can scrape together a few dollars for the
qualifying fee can offer for election and have the pleasure of seeing
his name printed on the ballot. But Willie’s case was a little dif-
ferent

There were then two major factions in the Democratic party in
the state, the Joe Harrison outfit and the MacMurfee outfit. Harri-
son had been Governor some time back, and MacMurfee was in
then and was going to try to hold the job. Hairison was a city man
and practically all of his backing was city backing. MacMurfee
wasn’t exactly a hick, having been born and bred in Duboisville,

which is a pretty fair-sized place, maybe ninety thousand, but he
had a lot of country backing and small-town backing. He had
played pretty smart with the cocklebur vote and mostly had it. It
was due to be a close race. That situation was what got Willie into
the show.

Somebody in the Harrison outfit got the idea, which God knows
he didn’t invent, of putting in a dummy who might split the Mac-
Murfee vote. This had to be somebody who had a strong appeal in
the country. So that was Willie, who could throw some weight up
in the north end of the state. There wasn’t any deal with Willie, it
developed. Some gentlemen from the city called on him up in
Mason City, driving up there in a fine car and striped pants. One
of them was Mr. Duffy, Tiny Duffy, who was a lot grander now
than he had been back that day when he and Willie had first met
in the back room of Slade’s beer parlor. The gentlemen from the
city persuaded Willie that he was the savior of the state. I suppose
that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and cagey-
ness, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you
is what you want to hear. Also there was the small matter of God.
People said that God had taken a hand in the schoolhouse business.
That God had stepped in on Willie’s side. The Lord had justified
him, Willie was not religious by any ordinary standards, but the
schoolhouse business very probably gave him the notion— which was
shared by a lot of the local citizenry— that he stood in a special re-
lation to God, Destiny, or plain Luck. And it doesn’t matter what
you call it or if you go to church. And since the Lord moves in a
mysterious way, it should not have surprised Willie that He was
using some fat men in striped pants and a big car to work His will.
The Lord was calling Willie, and Tiny Duffy was just an ex-
pensively dressed Western Union boy in a Cadillac instead of on a
bicycle. So Willie signed the receipt.

Willie was ready to ride. He was a lawyer now. He had been for
some little time, for after he had lost out as County Treasurer, he
had buckled down to his books pretty seriously, in what time he
could spare from farming and peddling his Fix-It Household Kit.
He had sat up tliere in his room late at night in summer, dog sleepy
but grinding his eyes into the page, while the moths tapped and
blurred at the window screen and tried to get onto the flame of the
oil lamp which sizzled softly on his table. Or he had sat up there on
winter nights while the fire died out in the rusty trash-burner stove
and the wind beat on the north side of the house, coming down a
thousand miles through the night to shake the room where Willie
sat hunched over the book. Long back, he had spent a year at the

Baptist College over at Marston, in the next count), long back
before he had met Lucy. The college wasn’t much more than a
glorified grade school, but thete he had heard the big names written
on the big books. He had left the college wdth the big names in his
head, because he didn’t have any money. Then the war had come
and he had been in it, stuck off somewhere in Oklahoma in a camp,
feeling cheated, somehow, and feeling that he had missed his
chance. Then after the war there had been the working on his
father’s place and reading books at night, not law books, just what
books he could get hold of. He wanted to know the history of the
country. He had a college textbook, a big thick one. Years later,
showing it to me, he prodded it with his finger, and said, “I durn
near memorized every durn word in it. I could name you every
name. I could name you every date.” Then he prodded it again,
this time contemptuously, and said, “And the fellow that wrote it
didn’t know a God-damned thing About how things w^ere. He
didn’t know a thing. I bet things were just like they are now. A lot
of folks wi'assling round.” But there had been the great names, too.
There had been a notebook, a big cloth-bound ledger, in which he
wrote the fine sayings and the fine ideas he got out of the books. A
long time later he showed me that, too, and as I thumbed idly
through It, noticing the quotations from Emerson and Macaulay
and Benjamin Franklin and Shakespeare copied out in a ragged,
boyish hand, he said with that same tone of amiable contempt,
“Gee, back in tiiose days I figured those fellows who wrote the books
knew all there was. And I figured I was going to get me a chunk of
it. Yeah, I figured I would sweat for me a chunk of it.” He laughed.
And added, “Yeah, I thought I was the nuts.”

He had been going to get a chunk of all there was. But in the
end it was a chunk of law. Lucy came into the picture, and then the
kid Tom, and diere was working, and later tlie courthouse, but in
the end he got a chunk of law. An old lawyer over at Tyree helped
him, lending him books and answ^ering questions. There had been
about three years of diat. If he had just been trying to squeeze
by the bar with as little as possible he could have done it a lot
sooner, for back in those days, or now for that matter, it didn’t take
any master mind to pass the bar examination. “I sure was a fool,”
Willie said to me once, talking about those times, “I thought you
had really to learn all that stuff. I thought they meant for you to
learn law. Hell, I got down to diat bar examination and I looked
at the questions and I nearly busted out laughing. Me sitting up
there bearing down on those books, and then they gave me those
little crappy questions. A corn-field nigger could have answered

them if he’d been able to spell. I ought to have looked twice at
some of the lawyers I’d seen and I’d have known a half-wit could
pass it. But, oh, no, I was hell-bent on learning me some law.”
Then he laughed, stopped laughing, and said with a touch of the
grimness which must have belonged to the long nights up there in
his room when he bent over the trash-burner or heard the moths
batting soft at the screen in the August dark: “'Well, I learned me
some law. I could wait.” He could wait. He had read the books the
old lawyer over at Tyree had, and then he bought new books, send-
ing away for them with the money he grubbed out of the ground or
got with his patented Fix-It Household Kit. The time came in the
end, and he put on his good suit, blue serge and slick in the seat,
and caught the train down to the city to take the examination. He
had waited, and now he really knew what was in the books.

He was a lawyer now. He could hang the overalls on a nail and
let them stiffen with the last sweat he had sweated into them. He
could rent himself a room over the dry-goods store in Mason City
and call it his office, and wait for somebody to come up the stairs
where it was so dark you had to feel your way and where it smelled
like the inside of an old trunk that’s been in the attic twenty years.
He was a lawyer now and it had taken him a long time. It had
taken him a long time because he had had to be a iaw}^er on his
terms and in his own way. But that was over. But maybe it had
taken him too long. If something takes too long, something hap-
pens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and noth-
ing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting
and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they
just ask you those crappy little questions.

But the wanting and the waiting were over now, and Willie had
a haircut and a new hat and a new brief case with the copy of his
speech in it (which he had written out in longhand and had said
to Lucy with gestures, as though he were getting ready for the high-
school oratorical contest) and a lot of new friends, with drooping
blue jowls or sharp pale noses, who slapped him on the back, and
a campaign manager, Tiny Duffy, who would introduce him to you
and say with a tin-glittering heartiness, “Meet Willie Stark, the next
Governor of this state!” And Willie would put out his hand to you
with the gravity of a bishop. For he never tumbled to a thing.

I used to wonder how he got that way. If he had been running
for something back in Mason County he never in God’s world
would have been that way. He would have taken a perfectly realistic
view of things and counted up his chances. Or if he had got into
the gubernatorial primary on his own hook, he would have taken

a realistic view. But this was different. He had been called. He had
been touched. He had been summoned. And he was a little bit awe-
struck by the fact. It seems incredible that he hadn’t taken one look
at Tiny Duffy and his friends and realized that things might not be
absolutely on the level. But actually, as I figured it, it wasn’t in-
credible. For the voice of Tiny Duffy summoning him was nothing
but the echo of a certainty and a blind compulsion within him, the
thing that had made him sit up in his room, night after night, rub-
bing the sleep out of his eyes, to write the fine phrases and the fine
ideas in the big ledger or to bend with a violent, almost physical
intensity over the yellow page of an old law book. For him to deny
the voice of Tiny Duffy would have been as difficult as for a saint
to deny the voice that calls in the night.

He wasn’t really in touch with the world. He was not only be-
mused by the voice he had heard. He was bemused by the very
grandeur of the position to which he aspired. The blaze of light
hitting him in the eyes blinded him. After all, he had just come out
of the dark, the period when he grubbed on the farm all day and
didn’t see anybody but the family (and day after day he must have
moved by them as though they weren’t half-real) and sat at night
in his room with the books and hurt inside with the effort and the
groping and the wanting. So it isn’t much wonder that the blaze of
light blinded him.

He knew something about human nature, all right. He’d sat
around the county courthouse long enough to find out something.
(True, he had got himself thrown out of the courthouse. But that
wasn’t ignorance of human nature. It was, perhaps, a knowledge
not of human nature in general but of his own nature in particular,
something deeper than the mere question of right and wrong. He
became a martyr, not through ignorance, not only for the right but
also for some knowledge of himself deeper than right or wrong.)
He knew something about human nature, but something now came
between him and that knowledge. In a way, he flattered human na-
ture. He assumed that other people were as bemused by the gran-
deur and as blinded by the light of the post to which he aspired,
and that they would only listen to argument and language that was
grand and bright. So his speeches were cut to that measure. It was
a weird mixture of facts and figures on one hand (his tax program,
his road program) and of fine sentiments on the other hand (a faint
echo, somewhat dulled by time, of the quotations copied out in the
ragged, boyish hand in the big ledger).

Willie went around the country in a good secondhand automo-
bile, which had been bought on the eighteen-payment plan, and

saw his face on the posters nailed to telephone poles and corncrihs
and board fences. He’d get to town, and after he’d been to the post
office to see if there was a letter from Lucy and after he had had
a session with the local politicos and done some handshaking (he
wasn’t too hot at that, too much talk about principles and not
enough about promises), he would hole up in a hotel room ($2.00
without bath) and work some more on his speech. He kept on
polishing and revising the damned thing. He was hell-bent on mak-
ing each one a second Gettysburg Address. And maybe after he had
tinkered with it awhile, he would get up and start pacing in his
room. He would pace and pace, and pretty soon he would start to
say his speech. If you were in the next room, you could hear him
pacing and speeching, and when he stopped pacing you knew he
had stopped in front of the mirror to polish up a gesture.

And sometimes I’d be in the next room, for I was supposed to
cover his campaign for the Chronicle. I’d be lying there in the hole
in the middle of my bed where the springs had given down with
the weight of wayfaring humanity, lying there on my back with my
clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette
smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-
down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or
like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the
last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the hori-
zontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest. I’d be lying
there letting the smoke drift up out of my mouth and not feeling
anything, just watching the smoke as though I didn’t have any past
or future, and suddenly Willie would start in the next room.
Tramping and mumbling.

It would be a reproach, an affront, a cause for laughter and a
thing for tears. Knowing what you knew, you would lie there listen-
ing to him getting ready to be Governor, and want to stuff the pil-
low slip in your mouth to stop the giggles. The poor half-witted
bastard and his speech. But the voice would keep on going over
there beyond the wall, and the feet would keep on tramping, back
and forth like the feet of a heavy animal prowling and swinging
back and forth with a heavy swaying head in a locked-up room, or a
cage, hunting for the place to get out, not giving up and irreconcil-
ably and savagely sure that there was going to be a loose board or
bar or latch sometime, not now but sometime. And listening to it,
you wouldn’t be so sure for a minute the bar or board would hold.
Or the feet would not stop and they were like a machine, which
was not human or animal either, and were tramping on you like
pestles or plungers in a big vat and you were the diing in the vat,

the thing that just happened to be there. The plungers didn’t care
about its being you, or not being you, in the vat. But they would
continue until there w^asn’t any you, and afterward for a long time
until the machine wore out or somebody switched off the juice.

Then, because you want to lie down in the late afternoon on a
strange bed in a shadowy room and watch the smoke drift up and
not think about anything, what you’ve been or what you’re going
to be, and because the feet, the beast, the plungers, the half-wit
won’t stop, you jerk yourself up and sit on die edge of the bed and
feel like swearing. But you don’t. For you are wondering, with the
beginnings of pain and insufiSciency, what it is inside that won’t
let the feet stop. Maybe he is a half-wit, maybe he won’t be Gover-
nor, maybe nobody will listen to his speeches but Lucy, but the
feet won’t stop.

Nobody would listen to the speeches, including me. They were
awful. They were full of facts and figures he had dug up about run-
ning the state. He would say, “Now, friends, if you will bear pa-
tiently with me for a few minutes, I will give you the figures,” and
he would clear his throat and fumble with a sheet of paper and
backbones would sag lower in the seats and folks would start clean-
ing their fingernails with their pocket knives. If Willie had ever
thought of talking to folks up on the platform just the way he
could talk to you face to face when he got heated about something,
leaning at you as if he meant every damned word he said and his
eyes bugging out and shining, he might have swayed the constitu-
ency. But no, he was trying to live up to his notion of a high des-
tiny.

It didn’t matter so much as long as Willie was playing the local
circuit. The carry-over of the schoolhouse episode was still strong
enough to mean something. He was the fellow on the Lord’s side
and the Lord had given a sign. The Lord had knocked over the
fire escape just to prove a point. But when Willie got down in the
middle of the state he began to run into trouble. And when he hit
a town of any size he found out that the folks didn’t care much
which side of a question was the Lord’s side.

Willie knew what was happening, but he didn’t know why. His
face got a little thinner, and the thin skin seemed to draw back
tighter over the flesh, but he didn't look worried. That was the
funny part. If ever a man had a right to look worried, it was Willie.
But he didn’t. He just looked like a man in a kind of waking
dream, and when he walked out on the platform before he began
talking his face looked purified and lifted up and serene like the
face of a man who has just pulled out of a hard sickness.

But he hadn't pulled out of the sickness he had. He had gallop-
ing political anemia.

He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He was like a man with
a chill who simply reckons that the climate is changing all of a sud-
den, and wonders why everybody else isn't shivering too. Perhaps it
was a desire for just a little human warmth tliat got him in the
habit of dropping into my room late at night, after the speaking
and the handshaking were over. He would sit for a spell, while I
drank off my nightcap, and not talk much, but one time, at Morris-
town, where the occasion had sure-God been a black frost, he did,
after sitting quiet, suddenly say, “How you think it’s going, Jack?”

It was one of those embarrassing questions like “Do you think my
wife is virtuous?” or “Did you know I am a Jew?” which are em-
barrassing, not because of anything you might say for an answer,
the truth or a lie, but because the fellow asked the question at all.
But I said to him, “Fine, I reckon it's going fine.”

“You think so, for a fact?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

He chewed that for about a minute and then swallowed it. Then
he said, “They didn’t seem to be paying attention much tonight.
Not while I was trying to explain about my tax program.”

“Maybe you try to tell 'em too much. It breaks down their brain
cells.”

“Looks like they'd want to hear about taxes, though,” he said.

“You tell 'em too much. Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat
boys, and forget the rest of the tax stuff.”

“What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio
between income tax and total income for the state gives an index
that-”

“Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don't give a damn
about that. Hell, make 'em cry, or make 'em laugh, make 'em think
you’re their weak and erring pal, or make 'em think you're God^
Almighty. Or make 'em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir 'em up,
it doesn't matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come baA
for more. Pinch 'em in the soft place. They aren't alive, most of
'em, and haven't been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have
lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won't set on their stom-
achs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give 'em
something to stir 'em up and make 'em feel alive again. Jmt for
half an hour. That's what they come for. TeU 'em anything. But
for Sweet Jesus' sake don't try to improve their minds.”

I fell back exhausted, and Willie pondered that for a while. He
just sat there, not moving and with his face quiet and pure, but

you had the feeling that if you listened close enough you would
hear the feet tramping inside his head, that something was locked
up in there and going back and forth. Then he said, soberly,
“Yeah, I know that’s what some folks say.”

“You weren’t born yesterday,” I said, and was suddenly angry
with him. “You weren’t deaf and dumb all the time )ou had the
job in the courthouse in Mason City. Even if you did get in because
Pillsbury put you there.”

He nodded, “Yeah,” he said, “I heard that kind of talk.”

“It gets around,” I said. “It’s not any secret.”

Then he demanded, “Do you think it’s true?”

“True?” I echoed, and almost asked myself the question before
I said, “Hell, I don’t know. But there’s sure a lot of evidence.”

He sat there a minute longer, then got up and said good night
and went to his room. It wasn’t long before I heard the pacing start.
I got undressed and lay down. But the pacing kept on. Old Master
Mind lay there and listened to the pacing in the next room and
said, “The bastard is trying to think up a joke he can tell ’em at
Skidmore tomorrow night and make ’em laugh.”

Old Master Mind was right. The candidate did tell a joke at
Skidmore. But it didn’t make them laugh.

But it was at Skidmore that I was sitting in a booth in a Greek
cafe after the speaking, having a cup of coflEee to steady my nerves
and hiding out from people and the cackle of voices and the smell
of bodies and the way eyes look at you in a crowd, when in came
Sadie Burke and gave the joint the once-over and caught sight of
me and came back and sat down across from me in the booth.

Sadie was one of Willie’s new friends, but I had known her from
way back. She was an even better friend, rumor had it, of a certain
Sen-Sen Puckett, who chewed Sen-Sen to keep his breath sweet and
was a fat boy, both physically and politically speaking, and had been
(and probably still was) a friend of Joe Harrison. Sen-Sen, according
to some guesses, was the fellow who originally had had the bright
idea of using Willie as the dummy. Sadie was ^ lot too good for
Sen-Sen, who wasn’t, however, a bad looking fellow. Sadie herself
wouldn’t have been called good looking, certainly not by the juries
who pick out girls to be Miss Oregon and Miss New Jersey. She was
built very satisfactorily but you tended to forget that, because of
the awful clothes she wore and the awkward, violent, snatching ges-
tures she made. She had absolutely black hair, which she cut off
at a crazy length and which went out in all directions in a wild,
electric way. Her features were good, if you noticed them, which

you were inclined not to do, because her face was pocked. But she
did have wonderful eyes, deep-set and inky-velvety-black.

Sadie wasn’t, however, too good for Sen-Sen because of her looks.
She was too good for him because he w’as a heel. She had probably
taken him up because he was good looking and then, again accord-
ing to rumor, she had put him into political pay dirt. For Sadie
was a very smart cooky. She had been around and she had learned a
lot the very hard way.

She was in Skidmore with the Stark party that time because she
was attached to the Stark headquarters troop (probably as a kind
of spy for Sen-Sen) in some such ambiguous role as secretary. As a
matter of fact, she was around a lot, and made a good many of the
arrangements and tipped off Willie about local celebrities.

Well, now she came up to my booth in the Greek restaurant with
that violent stride which w^as characteristic of her, and looked dotvn
at me, and demanded, *‘Can I sit with you?”

She sat down before I could reply.

*'Or anything else,” I replied gallantly, ‘‘stand, sit, or lie.”

She inspected me critically out of her inky-velvety-black, deep-set
eyes, which glittered in the marred face, and shook her head. “No
thanks,” she said, “I like mine with vitamins.”

“You mean you don’t think Fm handsome?” I demanded.

“I don’t care about anybody being handsome,” she said, “but I
never did go for anybody that reminded me of a box of spilled
spaghetti. All elbows and dry rattle.”

“All right,” I said. “I withdraw my proposal. With dignity. But
tell me something, now that you mention vitamins. You figure your
candidate Willie has any vitamins? For the constituency?”

“Oh, God,” she whispered, and rolled her eyes to heaven.

“All right,” I said. “When are you going to tell the boys back
home it’s no go?”

“What do you mean, no go? They’re planning on a big barbecue
and rally at Upton. Duffy told me so.”

“Sadie,” I said, “you know damned well they’d have to barbecue
the great woolly mastodon and use ten-doUar bills instead of let-
tuce on the buns. Why don’t you tell the big boys it’s no go?”

“What put that in your head?”

“Listen, Sadie,” I said, “we’ve been pals for a long time and you
needn’t lie to uncle. I don’t put everything I know in the papers,
but I know that Willie isn’t in this race because you admire his
oratory.”

“Ain’t it awful?” she demanded.

*1 know it’s a £rame-up/’ I said. “Everybody knows but Willie/'

“All right,” she admitted.

“When are you going to tell the boys back home it's no go, that
they are wasting dough? That Willie couldn’t steal a vote from Abe
Lincoln in the Cradle of the Confederac)?”

“I ought to done it long ago,” she said.

“When are you going to?” I asked.

“Listen,” she said, “I told them before this thing ever started it
was no go. But they wouldn't listen to Sadie. Those fat-heads—” and
she suddenly spewed out a mouthful of cigarette smoke over the
rounded, too red, suddenly outcuriing and gleaming underlip.

“Why don't you tell them it's no go and get the poor bastard out
of his agony?”

“Let them spend their God-damned money,” she said fretfully,
twitching her head as though to get the cigarette smoke out of her
eyes. “I wish they were spending a lot more, the fat-heads. I wish
the poor bastard had had enough sense to make them grease him
good to take the beating he's in for. Now all he’ll get will be the
ride. Might as well let him have that. Ignorance is bliss.”

The waitress brought a cup of coffee, which Sadie must have or-
dered when she came in before she spotted me. She took a drag of
the coffee, and then a deep drag of the cigarette.

“You know,” she said, jabbing out the butt savagely in the cup
and looking at it and not at me, “you know, even if somebody told
him. Even if he found out he was a sucker, I believe he might keep
right on.”

“Yeah,” I said, “making those speeches.”

“God,” she said, “aren't they awful?”

“Yeah.”

“But I believe he might keep right on,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“The sap,” she said.

We walked back to the hotel, and I didn't see Sadie again, except
once or twice to say howdy-do to, until Upton. Things hadn't im-
proved any before Upton. I went back to town and left the candi-
date to his own devices for a week or so in between, but I heard the
news. Then I got the train over to Upton the day before the bar-
becue.

Upton is way over in the western part of the state, the capital of
the cocklebur vote which was supposed to come pelting out of the
brush to the barbecue. And just a little way north of LFpton there
was the coal pocket, where a lot of folks lived in company shacks
and prayed for a full week's work. It was a good location to get a

sellout house for tlie barbecue. Those folks in the shacks were in
such a shape they’d be read’v to walk fifteen miles for a bait of fresh.
If they still had the sU'engtii, and it was free.

The local I rode puffed and yanked and stalled and yawed across
the cotton country. We’d stop on a siding for half an hour, w^aiting
for something, and I watched the cotton rows converging into the
simmering horizon, and a black stub of a burnt tree in the middle
distance standing up out of the cotton rows. Then, late in the after-
noon, the train headed into the cut-over pine and sagebrush. We
would stop beside some yellow, boxlike station, with the unpainted
houses dropped down beyond, and I could see up the alley behind
the down-town and then, as the train pulled out again, across the
back yards of houses surrounded by boaid or ware fences as though
to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country
which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. The houses
didn’t look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down,
ready to be abandoned. Some washing would be hanging on a line,
but the people would go off and leave that too. They wouldn’t have
time to snatch it off the line. It would be getting dark soon, and
they’d better hurry.

But as the train pulls away, a woman comes to the back door of
one of the houses— just the figure of a woman, for you cannot make
out the face— and she has a pan in her hands and she flings the
water out of the pan to make a sudden tattered flash of silver in the
light. She goes back into the house. To what is in the house. The
floor of the house is thin against the bare ground and the walls and
the roof are thin against all of everything which is outside, but you
cannot see through the walls to the secret to w’^hich the woman has
gone in.

The train pulls away, faster now, and the woman is back there in
the house, where she is going to stay. She’ll stay there. And all at
once, you think that you are the one who is running away, and
who had better run fast to wherever you are going because it wrill
be dark soon. The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems
to be through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel
tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increas-
ing and implacable magnetism of earth. You think that if the earth
should twitch once, as the hide of a sleeping dog twitches, the train
would be jerked over and piled up and the engine would spew and
gasp while somewhere a canted-up wheel would revolve once with
a massive and dreamlike deliberation.

But nothing happens, and you remember that the woman had
not even looked up at the train. You forget her, and the train goes

, 81

fast, and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the
sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between
the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the
water upsti'eam near the single leaning willow. And all at once you
feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately
whatever you felt is taken away from you, too.

You bloody fool, do you think that you want to milk a cow?

You do not want to milk a cow.

Then you are at Upton.

In Upton I went to the hotel, toting my little bag and my type-
writer through the gangs of people on the street, people who looked
at me with the countryman’s slow, full, curious lack of shame, and
didn’t make room for me to pass until I was charging them down,
the way a cow won’t get out of the way of your car in a lane until
your radiator damned near bats her in the underslung slats. At the
hotel I ate a sandwich and went up to my room, and got the fan
turned on and a pitcher of ice water sent up and took off my shoes
and shirt and propped myself in a chair with a book.

At ten-thirty there was a knock on the door. I yelled, and in came
Willie.

‘'Where you been?” I asked him.

“Been here all afternoon,” he said.

“Duffy been dragging you round to shake hands with all the
leading citizens?”

“Yeah,” he said, glumly.

The glumness in his voice made me look sharply at him. “What’s
the matter?” I asked. “Don’t the boys around here talk nice to
you?”

“Sure, they talk all right,” he said. He came over and took a chair
by the wTiting table. He poured some water into one of the glasses
on the tray beside my bottle of red-eye, drank it, and repeated,
“Yeah, they talk all right.”

I looked at him again. The face was thinner and the skin was
pulled back tighter so that it looked almost transparent under the
clusters of freckles. He sat there heavily, not paying any attention
to me as though he were mumbling something over and over in his
mind.

“What’s eating you?” I asked.

For a moment he didn’t act as if he had heard me, and when he
did turn his head to me there seemed to be no connection between
the act and what I had said. The act seemed to come from what
was going on inside his head and not because I had spoken.

“A man don’t have to be Governor,” he said,

I responded in my surprise, for that was the last thing I
ever expected out of Willie by that time. The showing in the last
town (where I hadn’t been) must have been a real frost to wake
him up.

man don’t have to be Governor,” he repeated, and as I looked
at his face now I didn’t see the tlim-skinned, boyish face, but an-
other face under it, as though the first face were a mask of glass and
now I could see through it to the other one. I looked at the second
face and saw, all of a sudden, the heavyish lips laid together to re-
mind you of masonry and the knot of muscle on each cheek back
where the jawbone hinges on.

“Well,” I replied belatedly, “the votes haven’t been counted yet.”

He mumbled over in his mind what he had been working on.
Then he said, “I’m not denying I wanted it. I won’t lie to you,” he
said, and leaned forward a little and looked at me as though he
were trying to convince me of the thing which I was already surer
of than I was of hands and feet. “I wanted it. I lay awake at night,
just wanting it.” He worked his big hands on his knees, making the
knuckles crack. “Hell, a man can lie there and want something se
bad and be so full of wanting it he just plain forgets what it is he
wants. Just like when you are a boy and the sap first rises and you
think you will go crazy some night wanting something and you
want it so bad and get so near sick wanting it you near forget what
it is. It’s something inside you—” he leaned at me, with his eyes on
my face, and grabbed the front of his sweat-streaked blue shirt to
make me think he was going to snatch the buttons loose to show me
something.

But he subsided back in the chair, letting his eyes leave me to
look across the wall as though the wall weren’t there, and said,
“But wanting don’t make a thing true. You don’t have to live for-
ever to figure that out.”

That was so true I didn’t reckon it was worthwhile even to agree
with him.

He didn’t seem to notice my silence, he was so wrapped up in his
own. But after a minute he pulled out of it, stared at me, and said,
“I could have made a good Governor. By God—” And he struck his
knee with his fist— “by God, a lot better than those fellows. Look
here—” and he leaned at me— “what this state needs is a new tax
program. And the rate ought to be raised on the coal lands the
state’s got leased out. And there’s not a decent road in the state
once you get in the country. And I could save this state some money
by merging some departments. And schools— look at me, I never

had a decent day’s schooling in my life, what I got I dug out, and
there’s no reason why this state—”

I had heard it all before. On the platform when he stood up there
high and pure in the face and nobody gave a damn.

He must have noticed that I wasn’t giving a damn. He shut up
all of a sudden. He got up and walked across the floor, and back,
his head thrust fon^m^d and the forelock falling over his brow. He
stopped in front of me. '‘Those tilings need doing, don’t they?” he
demanded.

"Sure,” I said, and it was no lie.

"But they won’t listen to it,” he said. "God damn those bastards,”
he said, "they come out to hear a speaking and then they won’t
listen to you. Not a word. They don’t care. God damn ’em! They
deseiwe to grabble in the dirt and get nothing for it but a dry gut-
rumble. They won’t listen.”

"No,” I agreed, "they won’t.”

"And I won’t be Governor,” he said, shortly. "And they’ll deserve
what tliey get.” And added, "The bastards.”

"Weil, you want me to hold your hand about it?” Suddenly, I
was sore at him. Why did he come to me? What did he expect me
to do? What made him think I wanted to hear about what the state
needed? Hell, I knew. Everybody knew. It wasn’t any secret. What
it needed was some decent government. But who the hell was going
to give it? And who cared if nobody did or ever did? What did he
come whining to me for about that? Or about how bleeding much
he wanted to be Governor because he lay and thought about it in
the night? All that was in me as I suddenly felt sore at him and
asked him snottily if he expected me to hold his hand.

He was looking at me slowly, giving me the once-over, reading
my face. But he didn’t look sore. Which surprised me, for I had
wanted to make him sore, sore enough to get out. But there wasn’t
even surprise in his look. "No, Jack,” he finally said, shaking his
head, "I wasn’t asking for sympathy. Whatever happens I’m not
asking you or anybody else for sympathy.” He shook himself
heavily, like a big dog coming out of the wet, or waking up. "No,
by God,” he said, and he wasn’t really talking to me now, "I’m not
asking anybody in the world for it, not now or ever.”

That seemed to settle something. So he sat down again.

"What are you going to do?” I asked.

"I got to think,” he replied. "I don’t know and I got to think.
The bastards,” he said, "if I could just make ’em listen.”

It was just at that time Sadie came in. Or rather, she knocked at
the door, and I yelled, and she came in.

''Hello/' she said, gave a quick look at the scene, and started
towai'd us. Her eye was on the bottle of red-eye on my table, “How
about some refreshment?” she asked.

“All right,” I replied, but apparently I didn't get the right
amount of joviality into my tone. Or maybe she could tell some-
thing had been going on from the way the air smelled, and if any-
body could do that it would be Sadie.

Anyivay, she stopped in the middle of the floor and said, “What's
up?"

I didn’t answer right away, and she came across to the writing
table, moving quick and nervous, the way she alw^a}s did, inside of
a shapeless shoddy-blue summer suit that she must have got by
walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing
and saying, “I’ll take that."

She reached down and took a cigarette out of my pack lying there
and tapped it on the back of her knuckles and turned her hot lamps
on me.

“Nothing," I said, “except Willie here is saying how he's not
going to be Governor."

She had the match lighted by the time I got the words out, but
it never got to the cigarette. It stopped in mid-air.

“So you told him," she said, looking at me.

“The hell I did," I said. “I never tell anybody anything. I just
listen."

She snapped the match out with a nasty snatch of her wrist and
turned on Willie. “Who told you?" she demanded.

“Told me what?" Willie asked, looking up at her steady.

She saw that she had made her mistake. And it was not the kind
of mistake for Sadie Burke to make. She had made her way in the
world up from the shack in the mud flat by always finding out what
you knew and never letting you know what she knew. Her style
was not to lead with the chin but with a neat length of lead pipe
after you had stepped oflE balance. But she had led with the chin
this time. Somewhere way back inside of Sadie Burke there had
been the idea that I was going to tell Willie. Or that somebody was
going to tell Willie. Not that she, Sadie Burke, would tell Willie,
but that Willie would be told and Sadie Burke wouldn’t have to.
Or nothing as specific as that. Just floating around in the deep dark
the idea of Willie and the idea of the thing Willie didn't know,
like two bits of drift sucked down in an eddy to the bottom of the
river to revolve slowly and blindly there in the dark. But there, all
the time.

So, out of an assumption she had made, without knowing it, or

a wish or a fear she didn’t know she had, she led with her chin.
And standing there, rolling that unlighted cigarette in her strong
fingers, she knew it. The nickel was in the slot, and looking at
Willie you could see the wheels and the cogs and the cherries and
the lemons begin to spin inside the machine.

“Told me what?” Willie said. Again.

“That you’re not going to be Governor,” she said, with a dash of
easy levity, but she flashed me a look, the only S O S, I suppose,
Sadie Burke ever sent out to anybody.

But it was her fudge and I let her cook it.

Willie kept on looking at her, waiting while she turned to one
side and uncorked my bottle and poured herself out a steady-er.
She took it, and without any ladylike cough.

“Told me what?” Willie said.

She didn’t answer. She just looked at him.

And looking right back at her, he said, in a voice like death and
taxes, “Told me what?”

“God damn you!” she blazed at him then, and the glass rattled
on the tray as she set it down without looking. “You God-damned
sapi”

“All right,” Willie said in the same voice, boring in like a boxer
when the other fellow begins to swing wild. “What was it?”

“All right,” she said, “all right, you sap, you’ve been framed!”

He looked at her steady for thirty seconds, and there wasn’t a
sound but the sound of his breathing. I was listening to it.

Then he said, “Framed?”

“And how!” Sadie said, and leaned toward him with what seemed
to be a vindictive and triumphant intensity glittering in her eyes
and ringing in her voice. “Oh, you decoy, you wooden-headed de-
coy, you let ’em! Oh, yeah, you let ’em, because you thought you
were the little white lamb of God—” and she paused to give him
a couple of pitiful derisive baa's, twisting her mouth— “yeah, you
thought you were the lamb of God, all right, but you know what
you are?”

She waited as though for an answer, but he kept staring at her
without a word.

“Well, you’re the goat,” she said. “You are the sacrificial goat.
You are the ram in the bushes. You are a sap. For you let ’em.
You didn’t even get anything out of it. They’d have paid you to
take the rap, but they didn’t have to pay a sap like you. Oh, no,
you were so full of yourself and hot air and how you are Jesus
Christ, that all you wanted was a chance to stand on your hind
legs and make a speech. My friends—” she twisted her mouth in a

nasty, simpering mimicry— ‘'my friends, what this state needs is a
good five-cent cigar. Oh, my God!’' And she laughed with a kind of
wild, artificial laugh, suddenly cut short

“Why?” he demanded, still staring steadily at her, breathing hard
but not showing anything. “Why did they do it? To me?”

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed and turned to me. “Listen to the
sap. He wants to know why.” Then she swung to him again, lean-
ing closer, saying, “Listen, if you can get this through your thick
head. They wanted you to split the MacMurfee vote. In the sticks.
Do you get that or do you want a picture? Can you get that straight,
you wooden-head?”

He looked at me, slow, wet his lips, then said, “Is it true?”

“He wants to know if it’s true,” Sadie announced prayerfully to
the ceiling. “Oh, my God!”

“Is it true?” he asked me.

“That’s what they tell me,” I said.

Well, it hit him. There was no denying it. His face worked as
thought he might try to say something or might bust out crying.
But he didn’t do either one. He reached over to the table and
picked up the bottle and poured out enough into a glass to floor
the Irish and drank it off neat.

“Hey,” I said, “take it easy, you aren’t used to that stuff.”

“He ain’t used to a lot of things,” Sadie said, shoving the bottle
toward him on the tray. “He ain’t used to the idea he’s not going
to be Governor. Are you, Willie?”

“Why can’t you lay off?” I said to her.

But she didn’t even notice me. She leaned toward Willie, and
repeated, coaxingly this time, “Are you, Willie?”

He reached for the bottle and did it again.

“Are you?” she demanded, not coaxing now.

“I was,” he said, looking up at her, the blood up in his face now,
the tousle of hair hanging, his breath coming heavy. “T was,” he
said, “before, but I’m not now.”

“Not what?” she said.

“Not used to it.”

“You better get used to it,” she said, and laughed, and shoved
the bottle in his direction.

He took it, poured, drank, set the glass down deliberately, and
said: “I better not. I better not get used to it.”

She laughed again, that wild artificial laugh, chopped off the
laugh, and echoed, “He says he better not get used to it. Oh, my
God!” Then she laughed again.

He sat there heavy in his chair, but not leaning back, the sweat

beginning to pop out on his face and run down slow and shining
over the flesh. He sat there, not noticing the sweat, not wiping it
awa}, watching her laugh.

Ail at once he heaved up out of the chair. I thought he was going
to jump her. And she must have thought so too, for her laugh
stopped. Right in the middle of the aria. But he didn’t jump her.
He wasn’t even looking at her. He flung his glance wide around
the room, and lifted his hands up in front of him, as though he
tvere ready to grab something. “I’ll kill ’eml” he said, “I’ll kill ’em!”

“Sit doum,” she said, and leaned quickly toward him to give him
a shove on die chest.

His pegs weren’t too steady, and he went down. Right in the
chair.

“I’ll kill ’em,” he said, sitting there, sweating.

“You won’t do a God-damned thing,” she announced. “You won’t
be Governor and you won’t get paid for not being and you won’t
kill them or anybody else, and you know why?”

“I’ll kill ’em,” he said.

“I’ll tell you why,” she said, leaning. “It’s because you’re a sap.
A triple-plated, spoon-fed, one-gallus sap, and you—”

I got up. “I don’t care what kind of games you play,” I said,
“but I don’t have to stay here and watch you.”

She didn’t even turn her head. I went to the door, and out, and
the last I heard she was defining what kind of a sap he was. I fig-
ured that that might take anybody some time.

1 took in a good deal of Upton that night. I saw the folks coming
out of the last show at the Picture Palace, and I admired the ceme-
tery gates and the schoolhouse by moonlight, and I leaned over
the railing of the bridge over the creek and spit in the water. It
took about two hours. Then I went back to the hotel.

When I opened the door of the room, Sadie was sitting in a
chair by the writing table, smoking a cigarette. The air was thick
enough to cut with a knife, and in the light of the lamp on the
table the blue smoke drifted and swayed and curdled around her
so that I got the impression I might have been looking at her sit-
ting submerged in a tank full of soapy dishwater at the aquarium.
The bottle on the table was empty.

For a second or two I thought that Willie had left. Then I saw
the finished product.

It was lying on my bed.

I came in, and shut the door.

“Things seem to have quieted down,” I remarked.

*Teah.”

I -walked over to the bed and inspected the item. It was lying on
its back. The coat was pushed up under the armpits, the hands
were crossed piously on the bosom like the hands of a gisant on a
tomb in a cathedral, the shirt had pulled up some from its moorings
under the belt and the two lowest buttons had come unbuttoned so
that a triangular patch of slightly distended stomach was visible-
white, with a few coarse dark hairs. The mouth was parted a little,
and the lower lip vibrated with a delicate flabbiness at each meas-
ured expulsion of breath. All very pretty.

*‘He rared around some,” Sadie said. “Telling me what he was
going to do. Oh, he*s gonna do big things. He's gonna be President.
He's gonna kill people with his bare hands. Oh, my Godl” She
took a drag on her cigarette and spewed the smoke out and then
fanned the backwash away from her face with a savage, slapping
motion of her right hand. “But I quieted him down,” she added,
with an air of grim, suddenly spinsterish, satisfaction, the kind your
great-aunt used to wear.

“Is he going to the barbecue?” I asked.

“How the hell do I know?” she snapped. “He wasn't screaming
about any little detail like a barbecue. Oh, he's a big operator.
But—” She paused, and did the drag and spew and fanning rou-
tine—“I quieted him.”

“It looks like you slugged him,” I observed.

“I didn’t slug him,” she said. “But I hit him where he lives.
I finally got across to him the kind of sap he is. And that quieted
him.”

“He’s quiet now, all right,” I said, and walked over toward the
table.

“He didn’t get that quiet all of a sudden. But he got quiet
enough to sit in a chair and hang on to the bottle for support and
talk about how he’d have to break the news to some God-damned
Lucy.”

“That’s his wife,” I said.

“He talked like it was his mammy and would blow his nose for
him. Then he said he was going right to his room and write her a
letter. But,” she said, and looked over at the bed, “he never made
it. He made the middle of the floor, and then heaved for the bed.”

She rose from the chair and went over to the bed and looked
down at him.

“Does Duffy know?” I asked.

“I don’t give a damn what Duffy knows,” she said.

I went over to the bed, too. “I guess we'll have to leave him
here,” I said. “I'll go over to his room and sleep.” I leaned over

and hunted for his room key in the pockets. I found it. Then I
took a tootlibrush and some pajamas out of my bag.

She was still standing by the bed. She turned to me. 'It looks
like you might at least take the bastard’s shoes off,” she said.

I laid down my truck on the side of the bed, and did it. I picked
up the pajamas and toothbrush and went over to the table to
switch off the lamp. Sadie was still by the bed. "You better write
that letter to that Mamma Lucy,” she said, "and ask where to ship
the remains.”

As I laid my hand on the switch, I looked back at Sadie standing
there looking down at the remains, with the left arm, the arm to-
ward me, hanging straight down and a cigarette hanging out of the
tips of two fingers and unreeling its spinner of smoke slowly up-
ward, and with her head leaning forward a little while she ex-
pelled smoke meditatively over her again outthrust and gleaming
lower lip.

There was Sadie, who had come a long way from the shanty in
the mud fiats. She had come a long way because she played to win
and she didn’t mean to win matches and she knew that to win you
have to lay your money on the right number and that if your num-
ber doesn’t show there’s a fellow standing right there with a little
rake to rake in your money and then it isn’t yours any more. She
had been around a long time, talking to men and looking them
straight in the eye like a man. Some of them liked her, and those
that didn’t like her listened when she talked, which wasn’t too
often, because there was reason to believe that when those big
black eyes, which were black in a way which made it impossible
for you to tell whether it was a blackness of surface or a blackness
of depth, looked at the wheel before it began to move they could
see the way the wheel would be after it had ceased to move and
saw the little ball on the number. Some of them liked her a lot,
like Sen-Sen. That had at one time been hard for me to get. I saw
a package done up in the baggy tweed or droopy seersucker suit,
according to the solstice, and the pocked face wiA the heavy smear
of lipstick and the black lamps in it and above it the mob of black
hair which looked as though it had been hacked off at ear length
with a meat cleaver.

Then one time, suddenly, I saw something else. You see a woman
around for a long time and think that she is ugly. You think she is
nothing. Then, all of a sudden, you think how she is under that
ba^ tweed or droopy seersucker. All of a sudden, you see the
face which is there under the pock-marked mask and is humble,
pure, and trusting and is asking you to lift the mask. It must be

like an old man looking at his wife and just for a second seeing the
face he had seen thirty years before. Only in the case I am talking
about it is not remembering a face which you have seen a long time
back but discovering a face which you have never seen. It is future,
not past. It is very unsettling. It was very unsettling, temporarily.
I made my pass, and it didn’t come to a thing.

She laughed in my face and said, **I’ve got my arrangements, and
I stick to m) arrangements as long as IVe got my arrangements.”

I didn’t know what the arrangements were. That was before the
day of jMr. Sen-Sen Puckett. That %vas before the day when she gave
him the benefit of her gift for laying it on the right number.

Nothing of this passed through my mind as I put my hand on
the switch of the lamp and looked back at Sadie Burke. But I tell
it in order that it may be known who the Sadie Burke was who
stood by the bed meditating on the carcass as I laid my hand on
the switch and who had come the way she had come by not leading
with her chin but who had led with her chin that night.

At least, that was the way I figured it.

I turned the switch, and she and I went out the door, and said
good night in the hall.

It must have been near nine the next morning when Sadie beat
on my door and I came swimming and swaying up from the bottom
of a muddy sleep, like a piece of sogged driftwood stirred up from
the bottom of a pond. I made the door and stuck my head out.

“Listen,” she said without any build-up of civilities, “Duffy's
going out to the fair grounds, and I’ll ride with him. He’s got a
lot of big-shotting to do out there. He wanted to get the sap out
pretty early, too, to mingle with the common herd, but I told him
he wasn’t feeling too good. That he’d be out a little later.”

“O.K.,” I said, “I’m not paid for it, but I’ll try to deliver him.”

“I don’t care whether he ever gets there,” she said. “It won't be
skin off my nose.”

“I’ll try to get him there anyway.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and walked off down the hall, twitch-
ing the seersucker.

I looked out the window and saw that it was going to be another
day, and shaved, and dressed, and went down to get a cup of coffee.
Then I went to my room, and knocked. There was some kind of a
sound inside, like an oboe blatting once deep inside a barrel of
feathers. So I went in. I had left the door unlocked the night before;

It was after ten by that time.

Willie was on the bed. In the same place, the coat still wadded

up under his armpits, his hands still crossed on his chest, his face
pale and pure. I went over to the bed. His head didn't turn, but
his eyes swung toward me with a motion that made you think you
could hear them creak in the sockets.

“Good morning,” I said.

He opened his mouth a little way and his tongue crept out and
explored the lips carefully, wetting them. Then he grinned weakly,
as though he were experimenting to see if anything would crack.
Nothing happened, so he whispered, “I reckon I was drunk last
night?”

“That's the name it goes by,” I said.

“It's the first time,” he said. “I never got drunk before. I never
even tasted it but once before.”

“I know. Lucy doesn't favor drinking.”

“I reckon she'll understand though when I tell her,” he said.
“She'll see how it was I came to do it.” Then he sank into medi-
tation.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel all right,” he said, and pried himself up to a sitting pos-
ture, swinging his feet to the floor. He sat there with his sock-feet
on the floor, taking stock of the internal stresses and strains.
“Yeah,” he concluded, “I feel all right.”

“Are you going to the barbecue?”

He looked up at me with a laborious motion of the head and
an expression of question on his face as though I were the fellow
who was supposed to answer. “What made you ask that?” he de-
manded.

“Well, a lot's been happening.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm going.”

“Duffy and Sadie have already gone. Duffy wants you to come
on out and mingle with the common herd.”

“All right,” he said. Then, with his eyes fixed on an imaginary
spot on the floor about ten feet from his toes, he stuck his tongue
out again and began to caress his hps. ”I’m thirsty,” he said.

“You are dehydrated,” I said. “The result of alcohol taken in
excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do
a man any good.”

But he wasn’t listening. He had pulled himself up and padded
off into the bathroom.

I could hear the slosh of water and the gulping and inhaling. He
must have been drinking out of the faucet. After about a minute
that sound stopped. There wasn't any sound at all for a spell. Then
there was a new one. Then the agony was over.

He appeared at the bathroom door, braced against the door*
jamb, staring at me with a face of sad reproach bedewed with the
glitter of cold sweat

'‘You needn't look at me like that," I said, “the likker was all
right"

“I puked," he said wistfully.

“Well, you didn’t invent it. Besides, now you'll be able to eat
a great big, hot, juicy, high-powered slab of barbecued hog meat."

He didn't seem to think that that was very funny. And neither
did L But he didn't seem to think it was especially unfunny, either.
He just hung on the doorjamb looking at me like a deaf and dumb
stranger. Then he retired again into the bathroom.

“I'll order you a pot of coffee,” I yelled in to him. “It'll fix you
up."

But it didn’t. He took it, but it didn't even take time to make
itself at home.

Then he lay down for a while. I put a cold towel on his fore-
head and he closed his eyes. He laid his hands on his breast, and
the freckles on his face looked like rust spots on polished alabaster.

About eleven-fifteen the desk called up to say that a car and two
gentlemen were waiting to drive Mr. Stark to the fairgrounds.
I put my hand over the receiver, and looked over at Willie. His
eyes had come open and were fixed on the ceiling.

“What the hell do you want to go to that barbecue for?" I said.
“I’m going to tell ’em to hist tail.”

“I’m going to the barbecue," he announced from the spirit world,
his eyes still fixed on the ceiling.

So I went down to the lobby to stall off two of the local semi-
leading citizens who'd even agreed to ride in the gubernatorial
hearse to get their names in the paper. I stalled them. I said Mr.
Stark was slightly indisposed, and I would drive him out in about
an hour.

At twelve o’clock I tried the coffee treatment again. It didn’t
work. Or rather, it worked wrong. Duffy called up from out at the
fairgrounds and wanted to know what the hell. I told him he’d bet-
ter go on and distribute the loaves and fishes and pray God for
Willie to arrive by two o’clock.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Duffy.

“Boy," I said, “the longer you don’t know the happier you’ll be,"
and hung up the phone.

Along toward one, after Willie had made another effort to re-
cuperate with coffee and had failed, I said, “Lock here, Willie, what

you going out there for? Why don’t you stay here? Send word you
are sick and spare } ourself some grief. Then, later on, if—”

he said, and pushed himself up to a sitting position on the
side of the bed. His face had a high and pure and transparent look
like a martyr’s face just before he steps into the flame.

‘‘Well,” I said, without enthusiasm, “if you are hell-bent, you
got one more ciiance.”

“More coffee?” he asked.

“No,” I said, and unstrapped my suitcase and got out the second
bottle. I poured some in a tumbler and took it to him. “According
to the old folks,” I said, “the best way is to put tw^o shots of
absinthe on a little cracked ice and float on a shot of rye. But we
can’t be fancy. Not with Prohibition.”

He got it down. There was a harrowing moment, then I drew
a‘sigh of relief. In ten minutes I repeated the dose. Then I told
him to get undressed while I ran a tub of cold water. While he
was in the tub I called down for the desk to get us a car. Then I
went to Willie’s room to get some clean clothes and his other suit.

He managed to get dressed, taking time out now and then for
me to give a treatment.

He got dressed and then sat on the edge of the bed wearing a
big label marked, Handle with Care— This End Up— Fragile, But
I got him down to the car.

Then I had to go back up and get a copy of his speech, which
he’d left in his top bureau drawer. He might need it, he said after
I got back. He might not be able to remember very well, and mi^t
have to read it.

“All about Peter Rabbit and Wallie Woodchuck,” I said, but he
wasn’t attending.

He lay back and closed his eyes while the tumbril bumped over
the gravel toward the fairgrounds.

I looked up the road and saw the flivvers and wagons and bug-
gies ranked on the outskirts of a grove, and the fair buildings, and
an American flag draped around a staff against the blue sky. Then,
above the sound of our coffee-grinder, I caught the strains of music.
Duffy was soothing the digestion of the multitude.

Willie put out his hand and laid it on the flask. “Gimme that
thing,” he said.

“Go easy,” I said, “you aren’t used to this stuff. You already—”

But he had it to his mouth by that time and the sound of it
gargling down would have drowned the sound of my words even
if I had kept on wasting them.

When he handed the thing back to me, there wasn’t enough in

it to make it worth m) while putting it in my pocket. What coi-
iecced in one corner when I tilted it wouldn’t make even a drink
for a high-school girl. ‘‘You sure }ou don’t want to finish it?” I
asked in mock politeness.

He shook his head in a dazed sort of way, said, “No, thanks,”
and then shivered like a man with a hard chill.

So I took what was left, and threw the empty pint bottle out of
the window.

“Drive in as close as you can,” I told the boy at the w^heel.

He got in pretty close, and I got out and gave Willie a hand, and
paid the kid off. Then Willie and I drifted slowly over the brown
and trodden grass toward a platform, while the crowd about us was
as nothing and Willie’s eyes were on far horizons and the band
played “Casey Jones.”

I left Willie in the lee of the platform, standing all alone in a
space of brown grass in a strange country with a dream on his face
and the sun beating down on him.

I found Duffy, and said, “Dm ready to make delivery, but I want
a receipt.”

“What’s the matter with him?” Duffy wanted to know, “The
bastard doesn’t drink. Is he drunk?”

“He never touches the stuff,” I said. “It’s just he’s been on the
road to Damascus and he saw a great light and he’s got the blind
staggers.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“You ought to read the Good Book more,” I told Duffy, and led
him to the candidate. It was a touching reunion. So I melted into
the throng.

There was quite a crowd, for the scent of burning meat on the
air will do wonders. The folks were beginning to collect around
in front of the platform, and climb up in the grandstand. The local
band was standing over to one side of the platform, now working
over “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” On the platform were the
two local boys who didn’t have any political future, who had come
to the hotel that morning, and another fellow who was by my
guess a preacher to offer up a prayer, and Duffy, And there was
W’^illie, sweating slow. They sat in a row of chairs across the back
of the platform, in front of the bunting-draped backdrop, and be-
hind a bunting-draped table on which was a big pitcher of water
and a couple of glasses.

One of the local boys got up first and addressed his friends and
neighbors and introduced the preacher who addressed God-Al-
mighty with his gaunt rawboned face lifted up above the blue

serge and his eyes squinched into the blazing light. Then the first
local boy got up and worked around to introducing the second
local boy. It looked for a while as though the second local boy was
the boy with the button after all, for he was, apparently, built for
endurance and not speed, but it turned out that he didn’t really
have the button any more than the first local boy or the preacher
or God*Almighty. It just took him longer to admit that he didn’t
have it and to put the finger on Willie.

Then Willie stood all alone by the table, saying, “My friends,”
and turning his alabaster face precariously from one side to the
other, and fumbling in the right side pocket of his coat to fish out
the speech.

W^ile he was fumbling with the sheets, and looking down at
them with a slightly bemused expression as though the stuff before
him were in a foreign language, somebody tugged at my sleeve.
There was Sadie.

“How was it?” she asked.

“Take a look and guess,” I replied.

She gave a good look up to the platform, and then asked, “How’d
you do it?”

“Hair of the dog.”

She looked up to the platform again. “Hair, hell,” she said, “he
must have swallowed the dog.”

I inspected Willie, who stood up there sweating and swaying and
speechless, under the hot sun.

“He’s on the ropes,” Sadie said.

“Hell, he’s been on ’em all morning,” I said, “and lucky to have
em.

She was still looking at him. It was much the way she had looked
at him the night before when he lay on the bed in my room, out
cold, and she stood by the side of the bed. It wasn’t pity and it
wasn’t contempt. It was an ambiguous, speculative look. Then she
said, “Maybe he was bom on ’em.”

She said it in a tone which seemed to imply that she had settled
that subject. But she kept on looking up there at him in the same
way.

The candidate could still stand, at least with one thigh propped
against the table. He had begun to talk by this time, too. He had
called them his friends in two or three ways and had said he was
glad to be there. Now he stood there clutching the manuscript in
both hands, with his head lowered like a dehorned cow beset by
a couple of fierce dogs in the barnyard, while the sun beat on him

and the sweat dropped. Then he took a grip on himself, and lifted
his head.

“I have a speech here,’* he said. “It is a speech about what this
state needs. But there’s no use telling you what this state needs.
You are the state. You know what you need. Look at your pants.
Have they got holes in the knee? Listen to your belly. Did it ever
rumble for emptiness? Look at your crop. Did it ever rot in the
field because the road was so bad you couldn’t get it to market?
Look at >our kids. Are they growing up ignorant as you and dirt
because there isn’t any school for them?”

Willie paused, and blinked around at the crowd. “No,” he said,
“I’m not going to read you any speech. You know what you need
better’n I could tell you. But I’m going to tell you a story.”

And he paused, steadied himself by the table, and took a deep
breath while the sweat dripped.

I leaned toward Sadie. “What the hell’s the bugger up to?” I
asked.

“Shut up,” she commanded, watching him.

He began again. “It’s a funny story,” he said. “Get ready to
laugh. Get ready to bust your sides for it is sure a funny story. It’s
about a hick. It’s about a redmeck, like you all, if you please.
Yeah, like you. He grew up like any other mother’s son on the dirt
roads and gully washes of a north-state farm. He knew all about
being a hick. He knew what it was to get up before day and get
cow dung between his toes and feed and slop and milk before
breakfast so he could set off by sunup to walk six miles to a one-
room, slab-sided schoolhouse. He knew what it was to pay high
taxes for that windy shack of a schoolhouse and those gully-washed
red-clay roads to walk over-or to break his wagon axle or string-
halt his mules on.

“Oh, he knew what it was to be a hick, summer and winter. He
figured if he wanted to do anything he had to do it himself. So he
sat up nights and studied books and studied law so maybe he could
do something about changing things. He didn’t study that law
in any man’s school or college. He studied it nights after a hard
day’s work in the field. So he could change things some. For him-
self and for folks like him, I am not lying to you. He didn’t start
out thinking about all the other hicks and how he was going to do
wonderful things for them. He started out thinking of number one,
but something came to him on the way. How he could not do
something for himself and not for other folks or for himself without
the help of other folks. It was going to be all together or none.
That came to him.

“And it came to him with the powerful force of God's own light-
ning on a tragic time back in his own home county two years ago
when the first brick schoolhouse ever built in his county collapsed
because it was built of politics-rotten brick, and it killed and
mangled a dozen poor little scholars. Oh, you know that story. He
had fought the politics back of building that schoolhouse of rotten
brick but he lost and it fell. But it started him thinking. Next time
would be different.

“People were his friends because he had fought that rotten brick.
And some of the public leaders down in the city knew that and
they rode up to his pappy's place in a big fine car and said how
they wanted him to run for Governor."

I plucked Sadie's arm. “You think he's going to—"

“Shut up,” she said savagely.

I looked toward Duffy up there on the platform back of Willie.
Duffy's face was worried. It was red and round and sweating, and
it was worried.

“Oh, they told him," Willie was saying, “and that hick swal-
lowed it He looked in his heart and thought he might try to change
things. In all humility he thought how he might try. He was just
a human, country boy, who believed like we have always believed
back here in the hills that even the plainest, poorest fellow can be
Governor if his fellow citizens find he has got the stuff and the
character for the job.

“Those fellows in the striped pants saw the hick and they took
him in. They said how MacMurfee was a limber-back and a dead-
head and how Joe Harrison was the tool of the city machine, and
how they wanted that hick to step in and try to give some honest
government. They told him that. But—" Willie stopped, and lifted
his right hand clutching the manuscript to high heaven— “do you
know who they were? They were Joe Harrison's hired hands and
lickspittles and they wanted to get a hick to run to split Mac-
Murfee's hick vote. Did I guess this? I did not. No, for I heard
their sweet talk. And I wouldn't know the truth this minute if
that woman right there—" and he pointed down at Sadie— “if that
woman right there—"

I nudged Sadie and said, “Sister, you are out of a job."

“—if that fine woman right there hadn't been honest enough
and decent enough to tell the foul truth which stinks in the nostrils
of the Most High!"

Duj0fy was on his feet, edging uncertainly toward the front of
the platform. He kept looking desperately toward the band as
though he might signal them to burst into music and then at the

crowd as though he were trying to think of sometliing to say. Thei?
he edged toiv^ard Willie and said something to him.

But the words, whatever they were, were scarcely out of his
mouth before Willie had turned on him. ‘‘Therer* Willie roared.
‘'There!'' And he waved his right hand, the hand clutching the
manuscript of his speech. “There is the Judas Iscariot, the lick-
spittle, the nose-wiper!”

And Willie waved his right arm at DuE)”, clutching the manu-
script which he had not read. Duffy w^as trying to sa\ something
to him, but Willie w^asn't hearing it, for he was waving the manu-
script under Duffy's retreating nose and shouting, “Look at him!
Look at him!”

Duffy, still retreating, looked tow^ard the band and waved his
arms at them and shouted, “Play, play! Play the ‘Star-Spangled
Banner'!”

But the band didn't play. And just then as Duffy turned back to
Willie, Willie made a more than usually energetic pass of the flut-
tering manusaipt under Duff^^'s nose and shouted, “Look at him,
Joe Harrison’s dummy!”

Duffy shouted, “It's a lie!” and stepped back from the accusing
arm.

I don't know whether Willie meant to do it. But anyway, he did
it. He didn't exactly shove Duffy off the platform. He just started
Duffy doing a dance along the edge, a kind of delicate, feather-
toed, bemused, slow-motion adagio accompanied by arms pinwheel-
ing around a face which was like a surprised custard pie with a
hole scooped in the middle of the meringue, and the hole was
Duffy's mouth, but no sound came out of it. There wasn't a sound
over that five-acre tract of sweating humanity. They just watched
Duffy do his dance.

Then he danced right off the platform. He broke his fall and
half lay, half sat, propped against the bottom of the platform with
his mouth still open. No sound came out of it now, for there wasn’t
any breath to make a sound.

All of that, and me without a camera.

Willie hadn’t even bothered to look over the edge. “Let the hog
lie!” he shouted. “Let the hog lie, and listen to me, you hicks. Yeah,
you're hicks, too, and they've fooled you, too, a thousand times,
just like they fooled me. For that’s what they think we're for. To
fool. Well, this time I'm going to fool somebody. I'm getting out
of this race. You know why?”

He paused and wiped the sweat off his face with his left hand,
a flat scouring motion.

‘‘Not because my little feelings are hurt. They aren’t hurt, I
never felt better in my life, because now I know the truth. Wliat
I ought to known long back. Whatever a hick wants he’s got to do
for himself. Nobody in a fine automobile and sweet-talking is going
to do it for him. When I come back to run for Governor again, I’m
coming on my own and I’m coming for blood. But I’m getting out
now.

“I’m resigning in favor of MacMurfee. By God, everything I’ve
said about MacMurfee stands and I’ll say it again, but I’m going
to stump this state for him. Me and the other hicks, we are going
to kill Joe Harrison so dead he’ll never even run for dogcatcher
in this state. Then we’ll see what MacMurfee does. This is his last
chance. The time has come. The truth is going to be told and I’m
going to tell it. I’m going to tell it over this state from one end to
the other if I have to ride the rods or steal me a mule to do it, and
no man, Joe Harrison or any other man, can stop me. For I got
me a gospel and I—”

I leaned to Sadie. “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got to get on a telephone.
I’m starting to town or the first telephone I hit. I got to telephone
this in. You stay here and for God’s sake remember what happens.”

“All right,” she said, not paying much mind to me.

“And nab Willie when it’s over and bring him to town. It’s a
sure thing Duffy won’t ask you to ride with him. You nab the sap,
and—”

“Sap, hell,” she said. And added, “You go on.”

I went. I worked around the edge of the grandstand, through the
crowd, with tlie sound of Willie’s voice hammering on the eardrums
and shaking dead leaves off the oak trees. As I rounded the end
of the grandstand, I looked back and there was Willie flinging the
sheets of his manuscript from him so they swirled about his feet
and beating on his chest and shouting how the truth was there
and didn’t need writing down. There he was, with the papers about
his feet and one arm up, the coat sleeve jammed elbow high, face
red as a bruised beet and the sweat sluicing, hair over his forehead,
eyes bugged out and shining, drunk as a hoot owl, and behind
him the bunting, red-white-and-blue, and over him God’s bright,
brassy, incandescent sky.

I walked down the gravel road a piece and hitched a ride on a
truck to town.

That night when all was still and the train bearing Duffy back
to the city (to report, no doubt, to Joe Harrison) was puffing across
the sage country under the stars and Willie had been in bed for

100

hours sleeping off the fumes, I reached for the bottle on the writing
table in my room at the hotel in Upton and said to Sadie, “How
about a little more of the stuff that let the bars down and kicked
the boards loose?”

“What?” she asked,

“You would not understand that to which I so grammatically
refer,” I said, and poured the drink for her.

“Oh, I forgot,” she said, “you're the fellow who went to college.*'

Yes, I was the fellow who had gone so grammatically to college,
where I had not learned, I decided, all there was to know.

Willie kept his word. He stumped the state for MacMurfee. Hi*
didn't ride the rods or buy him a mule or steal him one. But he
drove the pants off his pretty good secondhand car over the wash-
board and through the hub-deep dust and got mired in the black
gumbo when a rain came and sat in his car waiting for the span
of mules to come and pull him out. He stood on schoolhouse steps,
and on the top of boxes borrowed from the dry-goods store and on
the seats of farm wagons and on the porches of crossroads stores,
and talked. “Friends, red-necks, suckers, and fellow hicks,” he
would say, leaning forward, leaning at them, looking at them. And
he would pause, letting the words sink in. And in the quiet the
crowd would be restless and resentful under these words, the words
they knew people called them but the words nobody ever got up
and called them to their face. “Yeah,” he would say, “yeah,” and
twist his mouth on the word, “that's what you are, and you needn't
get mad at me for telling you. Well, get mad, but I'm telling you.
That's what you are. And me— I'm one, too. Oh, I'm a red-neck,
for the sun has beat down on me. Oh, I'm a sucker, for I fell for
that sweet-talking fellow in the fine automobile. Oh, I took the
sugar tit and hushed my crying. Oh, I'm a hick and I am the hick
they were going to try to use and split the hick vote. But I'm stand-
ing here on my own hind legs, for even a dog can learn to do that,
give him time, I learned. It took me a time but I learned, and here
I am on my own hind legs.” And he would lean at them. And
demand, “Are you, are you on your hind legs? Have you learned
that much yet? You think you can learn that much?”

He told them things they didn't like. He called them the names
they didn’t like to be called, but always, almost always, the rest-
lessness and resentment died and he leaned at them with his eyes
bugging and his face glistening in the hot sunlight or the red light
of a gasoline flare. They listened while he told them to stand on
their own hind legs. Go and vote, he told them* Vote for Mao

101

Murfee this time, he told them, for he is all you have got to vote
for. But vote strong, strong enough to show what you can do. Vote
him in and then if he doesn’t deliver, nail up his hide. “Yeah,”
he would say, leaning, “yeah, nail him up if he don’t deliver. Hand
me the hammer and I’ll nail him.” Vote, he told them. Put Mac-
Murfee on the spot, he told them.

He leaned at them and said, “Listen to me, you hicks. Listen
here and lift up your eyes and look on the God’s blessed and unfly-
blown truth. If you’ve got the brain of a sapsucker left and can
recognize the truth when you see it. This is the truth: you are a
hick and nobody ever helped a hick but the hick himself. Up there
in town they won’t help you. It is up to you and God, and God
helps those who help themselves!”

He gave them that, and they stood there in front of him, with a
thumb hooked in the overall strap, and the eyes under the pulled-
down hat brim squinting at him as though he were something spied
across a valley or cove, something they weren’t quite easy in the
mind about, too far away to make out good, or a sudden movement
in the brush seen way off yonder across the valley or across the
field and sometliins: might pop out of the brush, and under the
eyes the jaw revolving worked the quid with a slow, punctilious,
immitigable motion, like historical process. And Time is nothing
to a hog, or to History, either. They watched him, and if you
watched close you might be able to see something beginning to
happen. They stand so quiet, they don’t even shift from one foot
to the other— they’ve got a talent for being quiet, you can see them
stand on the street corner when they come to town, not moving or
talking, or see one of them squatting on his heels by the road, just
looking off where tlie road drops over the hill— and their squinched
eyes don’t flicker off the man up there in front of them. They’ve
got a talent for being quiet. But sometimes the quietness stops. It
snaps all of a sudden, like a piece of string pulled tight. One of
them sits quiet on the bench, at the brush-arbor revival, listening,
and all of a sudden he jumps up and lifts up his arms and yells,
“Oh, Jesus! I have seen His name!” Or one of them presses his
finger on the trigger, and the sound of the gun surprises even him.

Willie is up there. In the sun, or in the red light of the gasoline
flare. “You ask me what my program is. Here it is, you hicks. And
don’t you forget it. Nail ’em up! Nail up Joe Harrison. Nail up
anybody who stands in your way. Nail up MacMurfee if he don’t
deliver. Nail up anybody who stands in your way. You hand me
the hammer and I’ll do it with my own hand. Nail ’em up on the

102

barn door! And don’t fan away the bluebottles with any turkey
wing!”

it w^as Willie, all right. It was the fellow' with the same name.

MacMurfee was elected, 'Willie had something to do with it, for
the biggest \ote was polled in the sections Willie had worked that
they had any record of. But all the time MacMurfee didn’t quite
know' what to make of Willie. He shied off him at first, for Willie
had said some pretty hai'd things about him, and then w^hen it did
look as though Willie w^ould make an impression, he shilly-shallied.
And in the end 'Willie got up on his hind legs and said how the
MacMurfee people were offering to pay his expenses but he was on
his owm, he wasn’t MacMurfee ’s man, even if he w'as saying to vote
for MacIMurfee. He was paying his way, he said, even if he had to
put another mortgage on his pappy’s farm and the last one it would
hold. Yes, and if there was anybody w^ho couldn’t afford two dollars
to pay his poll tax and came to him and said it straight out, he,
'Willie Stark, would pay that tax out of money he had got by
mortgaging his pappy’s faun. That was how much he believed in
what he was saying.

MacMurfee was in, and Willie went back to Mason City and
practiced law. He must have dragged on for a year or so, handling
chicken-stealing cases and stray-hog cases and cutting scrapes (which
are part of the entertainment at Saturday-night square dances in
Mason County). Then a gang of workmen got hurt when some of
the rig collapsed on a bridge the state was building over the Acka-
mulgee River, and two or three got killed. A lot of the workmen
were from Mason County and they got Willie for their la^7er. He
got all over the papers for that. And he won the case. Then they
struck oil just west of Mason County over in Ackamulgee County,
and in that section Willie got mixed up in the litigation between
an oil company and some independent leaseholders. Willie’s side
won, and he saw folding money for the first time in his life. He saw
quite a lot of it.

During all that time I didn’t see Willie. I didn’t see him again
until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it
wasn’t a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge
of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of
Casey’s saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away
not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn’t any Demo-
cratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his
shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in
his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of die
picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white

103

like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures,
Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad,
tanned face and what they call die eyes of a dreamer. The man was
Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de
Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a
fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark)
handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape.
He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was
just Sadie Burke.

Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other peo-
ple. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had once
been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered that
there wasn’t going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speak-
ing, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend happened
to be Willie. He was the only place for them to go. They figured
they would sign on with Willie and grow up with the country.
Willie signed them on, all right, and as a result got quite a few
votes not of the wool-hat and cocklebur variety. After a while,
Willie even signed on Tiny Duffy, who became Highway Commis-
sioner and, later. Lieutenant Governor in Willie’s last term. I used
to wonder why Willie kept him around. Sometimes I used to ask
the Boss, “What do you keep that lunk-head for?” Sometimes he
would just laugh and say nothing. Sometimes he would say, “Hell,
somebody’s got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look
alike.” But once he said: “I keep him because he reminds me of
something.”

“What?”

“Something I don’t ever want to forget,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen
to anything they say, I don’t aim to forget that.”

So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big autO'
mobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a
little country lawyer.

But was that it? Or rather, was that all of it? I figured there was
another reason. The Boss must have taken a kind of pride in the
fact that he could make Tiny Duffy a success. He had busted Tiny
Duffy and then he had picked up the pieces and put him back
together again as his own creation. He must have taken a lot of
pleasure in looking at Tiny’s glittering rig and diamond ring, and
thinking that it was all hollow, that it was a sham, that if he should
crook his little finger Tiny Duffy would disappear like a whiff of
Jimoke. In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was

104

his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss put his meditative,
sleepy, distant gaze on Tiny, Tiny would know, with a cold clutch
at his fat heart, that if the Boss should crook a finger there wouldn't
be anything but the whiff of smoke. In a way, Tiny’s success was
a final index of the Boss’s own success.

But was that it? In the end, I decided that there was one more
reason behind the other reasons. This: Tiny Duffy became, in a
crazy kind of way, the other self of Willie Stark, and all the con-
tempt and insult which Willie Stark was to heap on Tiny Duffy
was nothing but what one self of Willie Stark did to the other self
because of a blind, inward necessity. But I came to that conclusion
only at the very end, a long time afterwards.

But now Willie had just become Governor and nobody knew
what would come afterwards.

And meanwhile—while the campaign was on— I was out of a job.

My job had been political reporting for the Chronicle, I had a
column, too. I was a pundit.

One day Jim Madison had me in to stand on the Kelly-green
carpet which surrounded his desk like a pasture. “Jack,” he saidi,
“you know what the Chronicle line is in this election.”

“Sure,” I replied, “it wants to elect Sam MacMurfee again be-
cause of his brilliant record as an administrator and his high in-
tegrity as a statesman.”

He grinned a little sourly and said, “It wants to elect Sam Mac-
Murfee.”

“I’m sorry I forgot we were in the bosom of the family. I thought
I was writing my column.”

The grin went off his face. He played with a pencil on his desk.
“It’s about the column I wanted to see you,” he said.

“O.K.,” I replied.

“Can’t you put some more steam in it? This is an election and
not a meeting of the Epworth League.”

“It is an election, all right.”

“Can’t you give it a little more?”

“When what you got to work with is Sam MacMurfee,” I said,
“you haven’t even got a sow’s ear to make a silk purse out of. I'm
doing what I can.”

He brooded over that for a minute. Then he began, “Now just
because that Stark happens to be a friend of yours, you—”

“He’s no friend of mine,” I snapped. “I didn’t even see him be-
tween last election and this one. Personally, I don't care who is
ever Governor of this state or how big a son-of-a-bitch he is. But
I am a hired hand, and 1 do my best to suppress in my column my

105

burning conviction that Sam MacMurfee is one o£ the fanciest
sons-of-~”

“You know the Chronicle line,” Jim Madison said heavily and
studied the spit-slick, chewed butt of his cigar.

It was a hot day, and the breeze from the electric fan was all
on Jim Madison and not on me, and there was a little thread of
acid, yellow-feeling saliva down in my throat, the kind you get
when your stomacli is sour, and my head felt like a dried gourd
with a couple of seeds rattling around in it. So I looked at Jim
Madison, and said, “All right.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean it the way I said it,” I said, and started for the door.

“Look here, Jack, Fm— ” he began, and laid the cigar butt down
on the ash tray.

“I know,” I said, “youVe got a wife and kids and your boy's in
Princeton.”

I said tliat and kept on walking.

There was a water cooler outside the door, in the hall, and I
stopped by it and took one of the little cone-shaped cups and drank
about ten of them full of ice water to wash the yellow thing out
of my throat. Then I stood there in the hall with my stomach full
of the water like a cold bulb inside of me.

I could sleep late, and then wake up and not move, just watch-
ing the hot, melted-butter-colored sunlight pour through the
cracks in the shade, for my hotel was not the best in town and my
room was not the best in the hotel. As my chest rose and fell with
my breathing, the sheet would stick damply to my bare hide, for
that is the way you sleep there in the summertime. I could hear
the streetcars and the blatting of automobile horns off yonder, not
too loud but variegated and unremitting, a kind of coarse, hoarse
tweedy mixture of sounds to your nerve ends, and occasionally the
clatter of dishes, for my room gave on the kitchen area. And now
and then a nigger would sing a snatch down there.

I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of
things a man might want run through my head, coffee, a girl,
money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide
off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your
hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don't want
them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don't
want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly
arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination
of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But sup

106

pose you aren't sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the
rules, a card doesn’t mean a thing. They all look alike.

So I could lie there, though I knew that I would get up after a
spell— not deciding to get up but just all at once finding myself
standing in the middle of the floor just as later on I would find
myself, with a mild shock of recognition, taking coffee, changing
a bill, handling a girl, drawing on a drink, floating in the water.
Like an amnesia case playing solitaire in a hospital. I would get
up and deal myself a hand, all right. Later on. But for the present
I would lie there and know I didn’t have to get up, and feel the
holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night
of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look
either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the imme-
diate effect on the human constitution is the same.

Lots of nights I would go to bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets
to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order
that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may
be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch
yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are
like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the
train, which hasn’t come yet. You look way up the track, but can't
see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all
at once you stop in the middle of your fidgeting, and listen. You
can’t hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday
clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch
you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the
first soundless rustle which wall come in the rail long before the
little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen
for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long
before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like
a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary
stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the
steps, and says, ‘Tassuh, little boss, yassuh.”

You don’t dream in that kind of sleep, but you are aware of it
every minute you are asleep, as though you were having a long
dream of sleep itself, and in that sleep you were dreaming of sleep,
sleeping and dreaming of sleep infinitely inward into the center.

That was the way it was for a while after I didn’t have any job.
It wasn’t new. It had been like that before, twice before. I had
even given a name to it— The Great Sleep. The time before I quit
the University, just a few months before I was supposed to finish
my dissertation for the Fh.D. in American History. It was almost
finished, and they said it was O.K. The sheets of typed-on paper

107

were stacked up on the table by the typewriter. The boxes of cards
were there. I would get up late in the morning and see them there,
the top sheet of paper beginning to curl up around the paper-
weight. And I'd see them there when I came in after supper to go
to bed. Finally, one morning I got up late and went out the door
and didn’t come back and left them there. And the other time the
Great Sleep had come was the time before I walked out of the apart-
ment and Lois started to get the divorce.

But this time there wasn’t any American History and there
wasn’t any Lois. But there was the Great Sleep.

When I did get up I just piddled around. I went to movies and
hung around speak-easies and -went swimming or went out to the
country club and lay on the grass and watched a couple of hot
bastards swing rackets at a little white ball that flashed in the sun.
Or perhaps one of the players would be a girl and the short white
skirt would swirl and whip about her brown thighs, and flash in
the sun, too.

A few times I went to see Adam Stanton at his apartment, the
fellow I had grown up with at Burden’s Landing. He was a hot-
shot surgeon now, with more folks screaming for him to cut on
them than he had time to cut on, and a professor at the University
Medical School, and busy grinding out the papers he published
in the scientific journals or took off to read at meetings in New
York and Baltimore and London. He wasn’t married. He didn’t
have time, he said. He didn’t have time for anything. But he’d
take a little time to let me sit in a shabby overstuffed chair in
his shabby apartment, where papers were stacked around and the
colored girl had streaked the dust on the furniture. I used to won-
der why he lived the way he did when he must have been having
quite a handsome take, but 1 finally got it through my head that
he didn’t ask anything from a lot of the folks he cut on. He had
the name of a softy in the trade. And after he got money, people
took him for it if they had a story that would halfway wash. The
only thing in his apartment that was worth a plugged nickel was
the piano, and it was the best money could buy.

Most of the time when I was at Adam’s apartment he would be
at the piano. I have heard it said that he was pretty good, but I
wouldn’t know. But I didn’t mind listening, not if the chair was
good and comfortable. Adam must have heard me say one time or
another that music didn’t mean much to me, but 1 suppose that
he’d forgotten it or couldn’t believe that it was true for anybody.
Anyway, he would turn his head at me and say, ‘‘This— now listen
to this— my God, this now is sure a—” But his voice would trail

108

off and tie words which were going to tell what the thing sure and
eternally was in its blessed truth would not e\er get said. He would
just leave the sentence hanging and twisting slowdy in the air like
a piece of frayed rope, and w^ould look at me out of his clear, deep-
set, ice-water-blue, abstract eyes-“the kind of eyes and the kind of
look your conscience has about three o’clock in the morning— and
then, unlike your conscience, he would begin to smile, not much,
just a sort of tentative, almost apologetic smile that took the curse
off that straight mouth and square jaw, and seemed to say, “Hell,
1 can’t help it if I look at )ou that way, buddy, it’s just the way
I look at things.” Then the smile would be gone, and he would
turn his face to the piano and set his hands to the keys.

Sooner or later he would get enough of the music and would
drop into one of the other shabby chairs. Or he might remember
to get me a drink, or might even take one himself, paler than winter
sunlight and about as strong. We’d sit tliere, not talking, sipping
slow, his eyes burning cold and blue in his head, bluer because of
the swarthiness of the skin, which was drawn back taut over the
bones of the face. It was like when we used to go fishing, when we
were kids, back at Burden’s I.anding. We used to sit in the boat,
under the hot sun, hour after hour, and never a word. Or lie on the
beach. Or go camping together and after supper lie by a little
smudge fire for the mosquitoes, and never say a word.

Perhaps Adam didn’t mind taking a little time out for me be-
cause I made him think back to Burden’s Landing and the other
days. Not that he talked about it. But once he did. He was sitting
in the chair, looking down at the eyewash in the glass which his
long, hard-looking, nervous fingers were slowly revolving. Then he
looked up at me, and said, “We used to have a pretty good time,
didn’t we? When we were kids.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You and me and Anne,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, and thought of Anne. Then I said, “Don’t you
have a good time now?”

He seemed to take the question under advisement for a half
minute, as though I had asked him a real question, which maybe it
was. Then he said, “Well, I don’t suppose I ever thought about it.”
Then, “No, I don’t suppose I ever thought about it,”

“Don^t you have a good time?” I asked. “And you a big-shoL
Don’t you have a good time being a big-shot?” I didn’t let go. I
knew it was a question you haven’t got any right to ask anybody,
not with the tone of voice I heard coming out of my mouth, but
I couldn’t let go. You grow up with somebody, and he is a success,

109

a big-shot, and )ou’re a failure, but he treats you just the way he
always did and hasn’t changed a bit But that is what drives you
to it, no matter what names you call yourself while you try to
stick the knife in. There is a kind of snobbery of failure. It’s a
club, it’s the old school, it’s Skull and Bones, and there is no nasty
supercilious twist to a mouth like the twist the drunk gets when
he hangs over the bar beside the old pal who has turned out to be
a big-shot and who hasn’t changed a bit, or 'when the old pal
takes him home to dinner and introduces him to the pretty little
clear-eyed woman and the healthy kids. There wasn’t any pretty
little woman in Adam’s shabby apartment, but he was a big-shot,
and I let him have it.

But it didn’t register on him. He simply turned on me the cam
did, blue gaze, slightly shaded by thought now, and said, 'It just
isn’t something I ever thought about.” Then the smile did the
trick to the mouth which under ordinary circumstances looked like
a nice, clean, decisive surgical wound, well healed and no pucker.

So I tried to make what amends I could for being what I was,
and pulled out the soft-and-sweet stop, and said, “Yeah, we did
have a good time when we were kids, you and Anne and me.”

Yes, Adam Stanton, Anne Stanton, and Jack Burden, back in
Burden’s Landing, had a good time when they were children by
the sea. A squall might, and did, pile in off the Gulf, and the sky
blacked out with the rain and the palm trees heaved in distraction
and then leaned steady with the vanes gleaming like wet tin in the
last turgid, bilious, tattered light, but it didn’t chill us or kill us
in the kingdom by the sea, for we were safe inside a white house,
their house or my house, and stood by the window to watch the
surf pile up beyond the sea wall like whipped cream. And back
in the room behind us would be Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis
Burden, or both, for they were friends, or Judge Irwin, for he was
a friend, too, and there wasn’t a wind that would ever have the
nerve to bother Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden or Judge
Irwin,

“You and Anne and me,” Adam Stanton had said to me, and I
had said it to him. So one morning, after I had managed to get out
of bed, I called Anne up, and said, “I hadn’t thought about you
in a long time, but the other night I saw Adam and he said you
and he and I used to have a good time when we were kids. So how
about having dinner with me? Even if we are on crutches now.”
She said she would. She certainly wasn’t on crutches, but we didn’t
have any fun.

She asked me what I was doing, and I told her, “Not a blessed

110

thing. Just waiting for my cash to run out.” She didn’t tell me I
ought to do something, and didn’t even look it. Which was some-
thing. So I asked her what she was doing, and she laughed and
said, “Not a blessed thing.” Wliich I knew w^as a lie, for she was
always fooling around with orphans and half-wits and blind nig-
gers, and not even getting paid for it. And looking at her you could
know it w’as all a waste of something and the something wrasn’t
money. So I said, “Well, I hope you’re doing it in pleasant com-
pany.”

“Not particularly,” she said.

I looked at her close and saw" what I knew I would see and what
I had seen a good many times when she wasn’t sitting across from
me. I saw Anne Stanton, who was not exacdy a beauty maybe but
who was Anne Stanton. Anne Stanton: the brown-toned, golden-
lighted face, not as dark as Adam’s, with a hint of the positive
structure beneath the skin, which was drawn over the bone with
something, a suggestion, of the tension which was in Adam’s face,
as though the fabricator of the job hadn’t wanted to waste any
material in softnesses and slacknesses and had stylized the product
pretty cleanly. The dark hair drawn smoothly, almost tautly, away
from the accurate part. The blue eyes which looked at you like
Adam’s eyes, with the same directness, but in which the clear, ab-
stract, ice-blue was replaced by a deeper, coiling, troubled blue.
Sometimes, anyway. They looked alike, Adam and Anne. They
might have been twins. They even had the same smile. But the
mouth it came on was, in Anne’s case, different. It didn’t carry any
suggestion of the nice, clean, decisive, well-healed surgical wound.
The fabricator had, on this item, allowed himself the luxury of a
little extra material. Not too much. But enough.

That was Anne Stanton, and I saw what I knew I would see.

She sat there before me, very erect, with her head held high and
straight on the fine, round stalk of her neck above the small, squar-
ish shoulders, and with her rather small but roundly modeled bare
arms laid close to her sides in mathematical accuracy. And looking
at her, I thought how, below the level of the table, her small legs
would be laid accurately together, thigh to thigh, knee to knee,
ankle to ankle. There was, in fact, always something a little stylized
about her— something of the effect one observes in certain Egyptian
bas-reliefs and statuettes of princesses of a late period, forms in
which grace and softness, without being the less grace or softness,
are caught in mathematical formality. Anne Stanton always looked
level at you, and you had the feeling that she was looking at some^
thing far away. She always held her head high, and you had the

III

feeling that she was waiting for a voice which you wouldn’t be able
to hear. She always stood so trim and erect, and you had the feeling
that all hei grace and softness was caught in the rigor of an idea
which you could not define.

I said, “You planning on being an old maid?”

She laughed, and said, “I’m not planning on anything. I quit
making plans a long time back.”

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy
tables, on which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken
bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the
dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like
acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream
which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can’t fig-
ure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like
waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and
yet distressed because now you won’t ever know what it had been
all about.

She must have felt the same way about it, for when, later, I asked
her to dance again, she said that she didn’t feel like it, she’d rather
talk. We talked, quite a lot, but it was a little bit like the dancing.
You can’t keep on talking forever about what a hell of a good
time you had when you were kids.

I took her to her apartment building, which was quite a few
cuts above Adam’s joint, for Governor Stanton hadn’t died exactly
a pauper, and left her in the lobby. She said good night, and, “Be
a good boy. Jack.”

“Will you have dinner with me again?” I asked her.

“Any time you want,” she said, “any time in the world. You know
that.”

Yes, I knew it.

And she did have dinner with me again, several times. The last
time she said: “I’ve seen your father.”

“Yeah,” I said in an unencouraging way.

“Don’t be like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t you even want to
know how he is?”

“I know how he is,” I said. “He’s sitting in that hole he lives in
down there or he’s helping round that mission with his bums, or
writing those damn-fool little leaflets they pass out to you on the
street, all about Mark 4:6, and Job 7:5, and his specs are down on
the end of his nose and the dandruff is like a snowstorm in the
Dakotas down on his black coat collar.”

112

She didn’t say anything for a minute, then said: '1 saw him on
the street and he didn’t look well. He looked sick. I didn’t recog-
nize him at first.”

“Trying to pass you some of that junk?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “He held out a piece of paper to me, and I was
in a hurry, so I just automatically put out my hand for it. Then I
realized he was staring right in my face. I didn’t recognize him at
first.” She paused a little. “That was about two weeks back.”

“I haven’t seen him in nearly a year,” I said.

“Oh, Jack,” she said, “you oughtn’t do that! You ought to see
him.”

“Look here, what can I say to him? And God knows, he hasn’t
got anything to tell me. Nobody made him live like that. Nobody
made him walk out of his law office, either, and not even bother
to shut the door behind him.”

“But, Jack,” she said, “you—”

“He’s doing w^hat he wants to do. And besides if he was fool
enough to do what he did just because he couldn’t get along with
a woman— especially a woman like my mother. If he couldn’t give
her what she wanted, whatever the hell it was she wanted and he
couldn’t give her, then—”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said sharply.

“Look here,” I said, “just because your old man was Governor
once and died in a mahogany tester bed with a couple of high-
priced doctors leaning over him and adding up the bill in their
heads and because you think he was Jesus Christ in a black string
tie, you needn’t try to talk to me like an old woman. I’m not talk-
ing about your family, I’m talking about mine, and I can’t help
seeing the plain unvarnished truth. And if you—”

“Well, you don’t have to talk to me about it,” she said. “Or any-
body.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Oh, the truth,” she exclaimed, and clenched her right hand on
the tablecloth. “How do you know it’s the truth? You don’t know
anything about it. You don’t know what made them do what they
did.”

“I know the truth. I know what my mother is like. And you do,
too. And I know my father was a fool to let her get him down.”

“Don’t be so bitter!” she said, and reached out to seize my fore-
arm and set her sharp fingers in it, through the coat, and shake it a
little.

“I’m not bitter. I don’t give a damn what they did. Or do. Or
why.”

IIS

^‘Oh, Jack/' she said, still clutching my forearm, but not hard
now, “can't you love them a little, or forgive them, or just not
think about them, or something? Something different from the way
you are?"

“I could go for the rest of my life and not think about them," I
said. Then I noticed that she was shaking her head ever so little
from side to side, and that her eyes were as dark a blue as they ever
got and too bright, and that she had drawn in the edge of her lower
lip and had set her teeth to it. I reached my right hand over and
took her hand off my left forearm and laid it down fiat, palm down,
on the tablecloth, and covered it with my hand. “Fm soiTy," I said.

“You’re not, Jack," she said, “you’re not sorry. Not really. You
aren’t ever sorry about anything. Or glad, either. You’re just— oh, I
don’t know w^hat."

“I am sorry," I said.

“Oh, you just think you are sorry. Or glad. You aren’t really."

“If you think you are sorry, who in the hell can tell you that you
aren’t?" I demanded, for I was a brass-bound Idealist then, as I have
stated, and was not going to call for a plebiscite on whether I was
sorry or not.

“That sounds all right," she said, “but it isn’t. 1 don’t,know why
—oh, yes, I do— if you’ve never been sorry or glad then you haven’t
got any way to know the next time whether you are or not."

“All right," I said, “but can I tell you this: something is happen*
ing inside me which I choose to call sorry?"

“You can say it, but you don’t know." Then, snatching her hand
from under my hand, “Oh, you start to feel sorry or glad or some-
thing but it just doesn’t come to anything."

“Y^ou mean like a little green apple that’s got a w^orm in it and
falls off the tree before it ever gets ripe?"

She laughed, and answered, “Yes, like little green apples with
worms in them,"

“Well,” I said, “here’s a little green apple with a worm in it: I’m
sorry."

I was sorry, or what went for sorry in my lexicon. I was sorry that
I had ruined the evening. But candor compelled me to admit that
there hadn’t been much of an evening to ruin.

I didn’t ask her to go to dinner with me again, at least not that
time while I was out of a job and doing the sleeping. I had hunted
up Adam and heard him play the piano. And I had sat across the
spaghetti and the Dago red and looked at Anne Stanton. And as a
result of what Anne said to me, I had gone down to the slums and
seen the old man, the not very tall man who had once been stocky

114

but whose face now drooped in puffy gray folds beneath the gray
hair, with the steel-rimmed spectacles hanging on the end of the
nose, and whose shoulders, thin now and snowed wdth dandruff,
sagged down as with the pull of the apparently disjunctive, careful
belly which made the vest of his black suit pop up above the belt
and the slack-hanging pants. And in every case I had found w^hat
I had known I w^as going to find, because they had happened and
nothing was going to change w^hat had happened. I had been sink-
ing down in the sleep like a drowning man in w^ater, and they had
flashed across my eyes again the way people say the past flashes
across the eyes of the drowning man.

Well, I could go back to sleep now. Till my cash ran out, any-
way. I could be Rip Van Winkle. Only I thought that the Rip Van
Winkle story was all wTong. You went to sleep for a long time, and
when you woke up nothing w^hatsoever had changed. No matter
how long you slept, it w^as the same.

But I didn’t get to do much sleeping. I got a job. Or rather, the
job got me. The telephone got me out of bed one morning. It was
Sadie Burke, who said, *‘Get down here to the Capitol at ten o’clock.
The Boss wants to see you.”

“The who?” I said.

“The Boss,” she said, “Willie Stark, Governor Stark, or don’t you
read the papers?”

“No, but somebody told me in the barbershop.”

“It’s true,” she said, “and the Boss said for you to get down here
at ten.” And she hung up the phone.

Well, I said to myself, maybe things do change while you sleep.
But I didn’t believe it then, and didn’t really believe it w^hen I
went into the big room with the black oak paneling and padded
across the long red carpet under the eyes of all the genuine oil
paintings of all the bewhiskered old men toward the man who
wasn’t very old and wasn’t bewhiskered and who sat behind a desk
in front of the high windows and who got up as I approached. Hell,
I thought, ifs just Willie^

It was just Willie, even though he was wearing something dif-
ferent from the country blue serge he had had on back at Upton.
But he just had the thing flung on him anyhow, with his tie loose
and to one side and the collar unbuttoned. And his hair hung down
over his forehead, the way it used to. I thought for a second that
maybe the meaty lips were laid together firmer than they used to
be, but before I could be sure, he was grinning and had come
around to the front of the desk. So I thought again it was just
Willie.

115

He put out his hand, and said, “Hello, Jack/'

“Congratulations," I said.

“I hear they fired you.”

“You heard wong,” I said. “I quit.”

“You were smart,” he said, “because when I get through with
that outfit they wouldn't be able to pay you. They won't be able to
pay the nigger washes the spittoons.”

“That will suit me,” I allowed.

“Want a job?” he asked.

“I'd consider a proposition.”

“Three hundred a month,” he said, “and traveling expenses.
When you travel.”

“Who do I work for? The state?”

“Hell, no. Me.”

“It looks like you'd be working for me,” I said. “This Governor-
ship doesn’t pay but five thousand.”

“All right,” he said, and laughed, “I'll be working for you then.”

Then I recollected how he'd done right well in his law practice.

“I'll give it a try,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. Then, “Lucy's wanting to see you. Come to din-
ner tomorrow night at the house.”

“You mean the Mansion?”

“What the hell you think I mean? A tourist home? A boarding
house? Sure, the Mansion.”

Yes, the Mansion. He was going to treat me just like old times
and take me home to dinner and introduce me to the pretty little
woman and the healthy kid.

“Boy,” be was saying, “we sure do rattle around in that place,
Lucy and Tom and me.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked him.

“Eat,” he said. “Come at six-thirty and eat hearty. Call up Lucy
and tell her what you want to eat.”

“I mean, what do I do for the job?”

“Hell, I don't know,” he said. “Something will turn up.”

He was right about that.

n§

Chapter Three

IT WAS always the same way when I came home and saw my
mother. I would be surprised that it ”was the way it was but I knew
at the same time that I had know it would be this w^ay. I would
come home with the firm conviction that she didn’t really care a
thing about me, that I was just another man whom she wanted to
have around because she was the kind of woman w^ho had to have
men around and had to make them dance to her tune. But as soon
as I saw her I would forget all that. Sometimes I forgot it even be-
fore I saw her. Anyway, when I forgot it, I would wonder why we
couldn’t get along. I would wonder even though I knew what
would happen, even though I would always know that the scene
into which I was about to step and in which I was about to say the
words I would say, had happened before, or had never stopped
happening, and that I would always just be entering the wide,
white, high-ceilinged hall to see across the distance of the floor,
which gleamed like dark ice, my mother, who stood in a doorway,
beyond her the flicker of firelight in the shadowy room, and smiled
at me with a sudden and innocent happiness, like a girl. Then she
would come toward me, with a brittle, excited clatter of heels and
a quick, throaty laugh, and stop before me and seize a little bunch
of my coat between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, in a
way that was childlike and both weak and demanding, and lift her
face up to me, turning it somewhat to one side so that I could put
the expected kiss upon her cheek. The texture of her cheek w^ould
be firm and smooth, quite cool, and I would breathe the scent
which she always used, and as I kissed her I would see the plucked
accuracy of the eyebrow, the delicate lines at the corner of the eye
toward me, and note the crinkled, silky, shadow^ed texture of the
eyelid, which would flicker sharply over the blue eye. The eye, very
slightly protruding, would be fixed glitteringiy on some point be-
yond me.

That was the way it had always been— when I had come home

117

from school, when I had come back from camps, when I had come
back from college, when I had come back from jobs— and that was
the way it was that late rainy afternoon, on the borderline between
winter and spring, back in 1933, when I came back home again,
after not coming home for a long time. It had been six or eight
months since my last visit. That time we had had a row about
my working for Governor Stark. We alwa)s sooner or later got into
a row about something, and in the two and a half years that I had
been working for Willie it usually in the end came round to Willie.
' And if his name wasn't even mentioned, he stood there like a
shadow behind us. Not that it mattered much what we rowed
about. There was a shadow taller and darker than the shadow of
Willie standing behind us. But I always came back, and I had come
back this time. I would find myself drawn back. It was that way,
and, as always, it seemed to be a fresh start, a wiping out of all the
things which I knew could not be wiped out.

“Leave the bags in your car,” she said, “the boy will get them.**
And she drew me toward the open door of the living room, where
the firelight was, and down the length of the room to the long
couch. I saw the bowl of ice, the siphon of soda, the Scotch on the
glass-topped table, all the items sparkling in the firelight.

“Sit down,” she said, “sit down. Son,” and put the fingers of her
right hand against my chest to give a little shove. It wasn’t much of
a shove, it didn’t put me off my balance, but I sat down, and sank
back into the couch. I watched her mix me a drink, and then a
sort of excuse of a drink for herself, for she never took much. She
held the glass out to me, and laughed that quick, throaty laugh
again. “Take it,” she said, and her face seemed to proclaim that
she was offering me something which was absolutely special, some-
thing which was so precious that it couldn’t be tied on God’s green
globe.

There’s a lot of likker in the world, even Scotch, but I took it
and gave a pull, feeling too that it was something special.

She sank down on the couch with an easy motion, vaguely sug-
gestive of a flutter and preening as when a bird touches a bough,
and took a sip, and lifted her head as if to let the liquor trickle into
her throat. She had drawn one leg up beneath her and the other
hung over with the sharp tip of the gray suMe pump stretched for-
ward to just touch the floor, with the precision of a dancer. She
turned cleanly from the erect waist to look straight at me, twisting
the gray cloth of the dress. The firelight defined her small, poised
features, one side bright, one side in shadow, and emphasized the
slight, famished, haunting hollow beneath the cheekbones (I always

118

figured, after I got old enough to do any kind of figuring, that it
was that— the hollow beneath the cheekbone— that got them) and
the careful swooping lift of her piled-up hair. Her hair was yellow-
ish, like metal, with gray in it now, but the gray was metallic, too,
like spun metal woven and coiled into the yellow. It looked as
though that was the way it had been intended from the very first to
be, and a damned expensive job. Every detail.

I looked at her and thought: Well, she's pushing fifty-five but Fll
hand it to her. And suddenly I felt old, and the thirty-five years I
had been living suddenly seemed to stretch back forever. But I had
to hand it to her.

She kept on looking at me, not saying anything, with that look
which always said, “You’ve got something I want, something I need,
something I’ve got to have,” and said, too, “I’ve got something for
you, I won’t tell you what, not yet, but I’ve got something for you,
too.” The hollow in the cheeks: the hungry business. The glittering
eyes: the promising business. And both at the same time. It was
quite a trick.

I took the last of the drink, and held the glass in my hand. She
reached out and took it, still watching me, and reached out to set
it on the little table. Then she said, “Oh, Son, you look tired.”

“I’m not,” I said, and felt the stubbornness in me.

“You are,” she said, and took me by the sleeve of the forearm
and drew me toward her. I didn’t come at first. I just let her pull
the arm. She didn’t pull hard, but she kept on looking straight
at me.

I let myself go, and keeled over toward her. I lay on my back,
with my head on her lap, the way I had known I would do. She let
her left hand lie on my chest, the thumb and forefinger holding,
and revolving back and forth, a button on my shirt, and her right
hand on my forehead. Then she put it over my eyes, and moved it
slowly upward over my forehead. Her hands were always cool. It
was one of the first things I remembered ever knowing.

For a long time she didn’t talk any. She just moved the hand
over my eyes and forehead. I had known how it would be, and knew
how it had been before and how it would be after. But she had the
trick of making a little island right in the middle of time, and of
your knowing, which is what time does to you.

Then she said, “You’re tired. Son.”

Well, I wasn’t tired, but I wasn’t not tired, either, and tiredness
didn’t have anything to do with the way things were.

Then, after a while, “Are you working hard. Son?”

I said, “So-so, I reckon ”

119

Then, after another while, “That man— that man you work for-”

“What about it?” I said. The hand stopped on my forehead, and
I knew it was my voice that stopped it.

“Nothing,” she said. “Only you don’t have to work for that man.
Theodore could get you a—”

“I don’t want any job Theodore would get for me,” I said, and
tried to heave myself up, but have you ever tried to heave yourself
up when you’re flat on your back on a deep couch and somebody
has a hand on your forehead?

She held her hand firm on my forehead and leaned over and said,
“Don’t now, don’t. Theodore is my husband, he’s your stepfather,
don’t talk that way, he’d like to—”

“Look here,” I said, “I told you I—”

But she said, “Hush, Son, hush,” and put her hand over my eyes,
and began to move it again upward over my forehead.

She didn’t say anything else. But she had already said what she
had said, and she had to start the island trick all over again. Per-
haps she had said it just so she could start over again, just to prove
that she could do it. Anyway, she did it, all over again, and it
worked.

Until the front door banged, and there were steps in the hall. 1
knew that it was Theodore Murrell, and started to heave up again.
But even now, just for the last instant, she pressed her palm down
on my forehead, and didn’t let go until the sound of Theodore’s
steps had entered the room.

I got to my feet, feeling my coat crawling up around my neck and
my tie under one ear, and looked across at Theodore, who had a
beautiful blond mustache and apple cheeks and pale hair laid like
taffy on a round skull and a hint of dignity at the belly (bend over,
you bastard, bend over one hundred times every morning and touch
the floor, you bastard, or Mrs. Murrell won’t like you, and then
where would you be?) and a slightly adenoidal lisp, like too much
hot porridge, when Ixe opened the aperture under the beautiful
blond mustache.

My mother approached him with that bright stride and her
shoulders well back, and stopped right before the Young Executive.
The Young Executive put his right arm about her shoulder, and
kissed her with the aperture under the beautiful blond mustache,
and she seized him by the sleeve and drew him over toward me, and
he said, “Well, well, old boy, it’s fine to see you. How’s tricks, how’s
the old politician?”

“Fine,” I said, “but I’m not a politician. I’m a hired hand.”

“Oho,” he said, “don’t try to kid me. They say you and the

120

Governor are just like this." And he held up two not thin, very
clean, perfectly manicured fingers for me to admire.

“You don’t know the Governor," I replied, “for the only thing
the Governor is just like this with—” and I held up two not very
clean and quite imperfectly manicured fingers— “is the Governor,
and now and then God-Almighty when he needs somebody to hold
the hog while he cuts its throat."

“Well, the way he’s going—” Theodore began.

“Sit down, you all," my mother told us, and we sat dowm, and
took the glasses she handed us. She turned on a light.

I leaned back in my chair, and said “Yes” and said “No," and
looked down the long room, which I knew better than any room in
the world and which I always came back to, no matter what I said.
I noticed that there was a new piece in it. A tall Sheraton break-
front desk, in the place where the kidney desk had been. Well, the
kidney desk would be in the attic now, in the second-string
museum, while we sat in the first-string museum and while Bowman
and Heatherford, Ltd., London, wrote a large figure in the black
column of the ledger. There was always a change in the room.
When I came home I’d always look around and wonder what it
would be, for there had been a long procession of choice examples
through that room, spinets, desks, tables, chairs, each more choice
than the last, each in turn finding its way to the attic to make w^ay
for a new perfection. Well, the room had come a long way from
the way I first remembered it, moving toward some ideal perfection
which was in my mother’s head, or in the head of a dealer in New
Orleans, or New York, or London, and maybe, just before she died,
the room would achieve its ideal perfection, and she would sit in it,
a trim old lady, with piled-up white hair, and silky skin sagging
off a fine jawbone, and blue eyes blinking rapidly, and would take
a cup of tea to celebrate the ideal.

The furniture changed, but the people in it changed, too. Way
back, there had been the thick-set, strong man, not tall, with a
shock of tangled black hair on his head and steel-rimmed glasses on
his nose and a habit of buttoning his vest up wrong, and a big gold
watch-chain, which I liked to pull at. Then he wasn’t there, and my
mother pressed my head against her breast and said, “Your Daddy
isn’t coming back any more. Son.”

“Is he dead?” I asked, “will he have a funeral?”

“No,” she said, “he isn’t dead. He has gone away, but you can.
think of him like he was dead. Son.”

“Why did he go away?”

“Because he didn’t love Mother. That’s why he went away/*

121

"I love you, Mother/' I said, 'I’ll love you always.”

“Yes, Son, yes, you love your mother,” she said, and held me tight
against her breast.

So the Scholarly Attorney was gone. I was about six years old
then.

Then there was the Tycoon, who was gaunt and bald and
wheezed on the stair. “Why does Daddy Ross puff going upstairs?”
1 said.

“Hush,” my mother said, “hush, Son.”

“Why, Mother?”

“Because Daddy Ross isn’t well, Son.”

Then the Tycoon was dead. He had not lasted long.

So my mother put me in a school in Connecticut and left me to
go across the ocean. When she came back there was another man,
who was tail and slender and wore white suits and smoked long
thin cigars, and had a thin black mustache. He was die Count, and
my mother was a Countess. The Count sat in the room with people
and smiled a great deal and didn’t say much. People looked side-
ways at him, but he looked straight at them and smiled to show the
whitest teeth in the world under the thin, accurate black mustache.
When nobody was there he played the piano all day, and then went
out wearing black boots and tight white trousers and rode a horse
and made it jump over gates and gallop along the beach till its
sides were flecked with lather and were pumping fit to die. Then
the Count came into the house and drank wis-kee and held a Per-
sian cat on his knee and stroked it with a hand which was not big
but which was so strong that he could make men frown when he
shook hands with them. And once I saw four blue-black parallel
marks on my mother’s upper right arm. “Mother,” I said, “looki
What happened?”

“Nothing,” she said, “I just hurt myself.” And she pulled the
scarf down over her arm.

The Count’s name was Covelli. People said, “That Count fellow
is a son-of-a-bitch, but he can evermore ride a horse.”

Then he was gone. I was sorry, for I had liked the Count. I had
liked to watch him ride a horse.

Then there was quite a while when there was nobody.

Then there was the Young Executive, who had been a Young
Executive from the day his mother gave the last push and would be
a Young Executive until the day they drained out the blood and
pumped in the embalming fluid. But that would be a long time off,
because he was just forty-four, and sitting at the desk at the oil

122

company whei’e he earned the pin money to supplement his allow-
ance wasn’t breaking him down fast.

W^ell, I'd sat in that room with all of them, the Scholarly Attor-
ney and the Tycoon and the Count and the Young Executive, and
had watched the furniture change. So now I sat and looked at
Theodore and at the new Sheraton break-fiont desk, and wondered
how permanent they were.

I had come home. I was the thing that always came back.

It kept on raining that night. I lay in a big fine old family bed,
which had come from somebody else’s family (a long time ago there
had been a white iron bed in my room standing on the floor mat-
ting, and the big fine old mahogany Burden familv bed, which
hadn’t been fine enough and which was now in the attic, had been
in my mother’s room) and listened to the rain hiss on the live-oak
and magnolia leaves. In the morning it had stopped raining, and
there was sun. I went out and saw the thin pools of water standing
on the black ground, like sheets of isinglass. Around the japonicas,
the white and red and coral petals, which had been shattered from
the blossoms, floated on the blackly gleaming pools. Some of them
floated with the curled edges upward, like boats, and around them
other petals floated upside down or had shipped water, making a
gay carnage as though a battleship had fired a couple of salvos into
a fleet of carnival barges and gondolas in some giddy, happy, far-off
land.

There was a massive japonica tree by the steps. I leaned over to
scoop up some petals in my hand. The water was very cold. I held
the petals in my hand, and walked down the curving drive to the
gate. I stood there, pressing the petals in the palm and looking out
at the bay, which was very bright beyond the strip of whitish sand
streaked with drift.

But before noon it began to rain again, a long drizzle and drip
from the spongy sky that lasted two days. That afternoon, and the
next morning, and the next afternoon, I put on a raincoat belong-
ing to the Young Executive and walked in the drizzle. Not that I
was a walker who just has to have his lungs flushed out with ozone.
But walking seemed the thing to do. The first afternoon I walked
down the beach, past the Stanton place, which was cold and hollow-
looking beyond the dripping leaves, and on out to the Irwin place,
where Judge Irwin put me in a chair with my heels to the fire and
opened a bottle of his choice old Maryland ry^e to give me a drink,
and invited me to dinner the next night. But I took one drink and
left, and walked on where there weren’t any more houses, just brush

123

and oak tangles with here and there a pine rising, and occasionally
an open patch of ground with a gray shack.

And the next day I walked up the bay, through the streets of the
town, and on beyond till I came to the little half-moon-shaped cove
off the bay, where the pine grove came down close to the white sand.
I walked Just under the shelter of the pines, my heels deep in the
needles, then I came out on the sand. There was a place where a
half-charred log lay, very black with the wetness and around it the
sodden ashes and black butts of driftwood, blacker for the white
sand. People still came here for picnics. Well, I had come here for
picnics, too. I knew what picnics 'were like.

I knew what a picnic was like, all right.

Anne and Adam and I had come here years before when we were
kids, but it was not raining that day. Not till the end. It was very
hot and very still. You could look down the bay, beyond the cove,
toward the Gulf, and see the water lifting up into the light as
though the horizon had ceased to exist. We swam, and ate our lunch,
lying on the sand, then fished some more. But we didn’t have any
luck. By that time clouds had begun to pile, working in over the
whole sky, except toward the west, beyond the pines, where the
light struck through the break. The water was very still, and sud-
denly dark with the darkness of the sky, and away across the bay
the line of woods looked black now, not green, above the whiteness
of the line which was the beach way over there. A boat, a catboat,
was becalmed over in that direction, nearly a mile away, and under
the sky and over the dark water and against the black line of the
woods, you never saw anything so heartbreakingly white as the
sharp sail.

“He better get in,” Adam said. “It’s going to blow.”

“Not quick,” Anne said, “let’s swim again.”

“Better not.” Adam hesitated and looked off at the sky.

“Let’s,” she insisted, and pulled at his arm. He didn’t respond,
still scanning the sky. All at once she dropped his arm and laughed
and began to run toward the water. She didn’t run directly to the
water, but up the beach, toward a little spit, with her bobbed hair
back loose on the air. I watched her run. She ran with her arms not
quite outspread, crooked at the elbows, and with a motion of her
legs which was graceful and free, and somehow awkward at the
same time, as though she hadn’t quite forgotten one kind of run-
ning, the child’s running, and hadn’t quite learned another kind
of running, the woman’s running. The legs seemed to be hung too
loose, somewhat uncertainly, from the little hips, which weren’t

124

quite rounded yet. I watched her and noticed that her legs were
long. Which I had never noticed before.

It wasn't a noise, but, instead, a stillness that made me turn sud-
denly to Adam. He was staring at me. WHien I met his eyes, his face
flushed, and he jerked his eyes off me, as though embarrassed. Then
he said, “I'll race you," huskily, and ran after her. I ran too, and
his feet threw the sand back at me.

Anne was out in the water swimming now. Adam plunged in
after her and swam hard and straight, outdistancing me. He passed
right by Anne, and kept on swimming. He was a wonderful swim-
mer. He hadn't wanted to swim but now he would swim straight
out, hard and fast.

I came up to Anne, and slowed down, and said, “Hello." She
lifted her head high for an instant, with the gracile motion a seal
has, and smiled, then curled over forward in a clean surface dive.
Her sharp small heels, side by side, flickered for a second above the
water, then drew under. I caught up with her, and she did it again.
Every time I caught up with her she would lift her head, and smile,
and dive again. The fifth time I caught up, she didn't dive. She
rolled over with a light, lounging twist of her body, and floated on
her back, looking up at the sky, her arms spread wide. So I turned
over, too, and floated, about five or six feet from her, and looked
up at the sky.

The sky was darker now, with a purplish, greenish cast. The
color of a turning grape. But it still looked high, with worlds of air
under it. A gull crossed, very high, directly above me. Against the
sky it was whiter even than the sail had been. It passed clear across
all the sky I could see. I wondered if Anne had seen the gull. When
I looked at her, her eyes were closed. Her arms were still spread out
wide, and her hair wavered out free on the water from around her
head. Her head was far back, her chin lifted. Her face looked very
smooth, as though she were asleep. As I lay in the water, I could see
her profile sharp against the far-off black trees.

All at once, she turned, in the direction away from me, as though
I hadn't been there, and began to swim in. She swam with a slow
stroke now that seemed retarded and yet effortless. Her thin arms
rose and sank with a languid and bemused and fastidious punctu-
ality, like your own effordess motion in a dream.

Before we got to the beach, the rain had begun, big, spaced,
heavy, independent drops that prickled the yet glossy surface of the
water. Then it was a driving gust of rain, and the surface of the
water was gone.

We rose out of the water and stood on the sand, with the rain

125

whipping our skin, and looked out at Adam, who was coming in.
He still had a long way to come. Down the bay beyond him, to the
soutli, the lightning kept forking out of the dark sky, ivith steady
thunder. Now and then Adam seemed, for a moment, to be lost in
a driving sheet of rain which w^ould rake over the "water. Watching
him, Anne stood there witli her head bowed forward a little, almost
pensively, and her shoulders hunched and her arms a'ossed over
her insignificant breasts, hugging herself as though she were just
about to shiver, and her knees tight together and slightly bent.

Adam came in, we gathered up our stuff, put on our sopping
sandals, and passed through the pine grove, where the black masses
heaved above us and the boughs made a stridor which you caught
now and then coming out o£ the roar. We reached our car and went
home. That summer I was seventeen, Adam was about my age, and
Anne was four years younger, or about that. That was back before
the World War, or rather, before we got into it.

That was a picnic I never forgot.

I suppose that that day I first saw Anne and Adam as separate,
individual people, whose ways of acting were special, mysterious,
and important. And perhaps, too, that day I first saw myself as a
person. But that is not what I am talking about. What happened
was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a
great many things and can remember a great many things, but that
is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the
kind I am talking about, the kind which become more and more
vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their
reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning
which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last
veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the
brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that
the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without
the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film
rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the un-
answered letters.

The image I got in my head that day was the image of her face
lying in the water, very smooth, with the eyes closed, under the
dark greenish-purple sky, with the white gull passing over.

This is not to say that I fell in love with Anne that day. She was
a kid then. That came later. But the image would have been there
if I had never fallen in love with her, or had never seen her again,
or had grown to detest her. There were times afterwards when I was
not in love with Anne. Anne told me she wouldn't marry me, and
after a while I married Lois who was a better-looking girl than

126

Anne, the kind they turn around on the street to see, and I was in
love with Lois. But the image was there all the time, growing
brighter as the veils were withdrawn and making the promise of a
greater brightness.

So when I stepped out of the pine grove, that drizzly early-spring
afternoon a long time afterward, and saw the charred lo,^ on the
white sand where a picnic had been, I remembered the picnic back
in the summer of 1915, the last picnic we had before I left home to
go to college.

I wasn’t going such a hell of a long way to college. Just up to the
State University.

‘‘Oh, Son,” my mother said, “why don’t you be sensible and go to
Harvard or Princeton.” For a woman out of the scrub country of
Arkansas, my mother had certainly learned a lot by that time about
our better educational institutions. “Or even Williams,” she said.
“They say it’s a nice refined place.”

“I went to school where you wanted,” I said, “and it was sure
refined.”

“Or even Virginia,” she went on, looking brightly at my face and
not hearing a word I said. “Your father went to the University of
Virginia.”

“That shouldn’t be such a big recommendation to you,” I said,
and thought how smart I was to get that one off. I had got in the
habit in arguments with her of making some reference to his leav-
ing.

But she didn’t hear that, eitner. She just went on, “If you were
East, then it would be easier for you to come over for the summer
and see me.”

“They’re fighting a war over there now,” I said.

“They’ll atop before long,” she said, “then it will be easier.”

“Yeah, and it would be easier for you to tell somebody I was in
Harvard than in a place they never heard of like State. They
wouldn’t even have heard of the name of the state it was in.”

“It’s just I want you to go to a nice place, Son, where you’ll make
nice friends. And like I said, it would be easier for you to come
over to see me in the summer.”

(She was talking about going to Europe again, and was very an-
noyed at the war. The Count had been gone quite a spell, since
just before the war, and she was going back across. She did go back
across, after the war, but she didn’t get any more counts. Maybe she
figured it was too expensive to marry them. She didn’t marry again
until the Young Executive.)

Well, I fold her I didn’t want to go to a nice place and didn’t

127

want any nice friends and wasn’t going to Europe and wasn’t going
to take any money from her. That last part about the money just
slipped out in the heat of the moment. It seemed a big manly thing
to say, but the effect was so much superior to anything I had ex-
pected that I couldn’t renege and spoil the drama. It knocked her
breadi out. It almost floored her. I suppose that she wasn’t accus-
tomed to hear anything in pants talk like that. Not that she didn’t
try to persuade me, but I got on my high horse and was stubborn.
A thousand times in tlie next four years I thought w^hat a damned
fool I was. I would be hashing or typing or even, in the last year,
doing part-time newspaper work, and would think how I had
thrown away about five thousand dollars, just because I had read
something in a book about its being manly to work your way
through college. Not that my mother didn’t send me money. On
Christmas and birthdays. And I took that and had me a blowout,
a real one with trimmings for days, and then went back to hashing
or whatever it was. They didn’t take me in the Army. Bad feet.

When he got back from the war, he was full of beans about it. He
had been a colonel of artillery and had had himself a wonderful
time. He had got there early enough to fire off a lot of iron at the
Germans and to dodge a lot of their stuff in reply. In the Spanish-
American War he hadn’t got farther than a case of flux in Florida.
But now his happiness was complete. He felt that all the years he
had been making maps of Caesar’s campaigns and making working
models of catapults and ballistas and scorpions and wild asses and
battering rams along ancient and medieval lines hadn’t been wasted.
Well, they hadn’t been wasted as far as I was concerned, for I used
to help him make them when I was a kid, and the tricks were won-
derful little gadgets. For a kid, anyway. And the war hadn’t been
wasted, either, for he had made a visit to Alise-Ste-Reine, which was
where Caesar beat Vercingetorix, and toward the end of the sum-
mer after he got back he had Foch and Caesar ^d Pershing and
Haig and Vercingetorix and Critognatus and Vercassivellaunus and
Ludendorff and Edith Cavell pretty well mixed up in his mind.
And he got out all the catapults and scorpions we had made and
dusted them off. But he had been a good officer, they said, and a
brave man. He had a medal to prove it.

I suppose that for a long time I took a snotty tone about the
Judge as hero because it was a fashion for a while to take such
a tone about heroes and I grew up in that fashion. Or perhaps
it was because I had bad feet and never got into the Army, or
even the S.A.T.C. when I was in college, and therefore had the
case of sour grapes that the wallflower always has. Perhaps if I had

J28

been in the Army everything would have been different. But the
Judge was a brave man, even if he did have a medal to prove it.
He had proved it before he ever got the medal. And he was to
prove it again. There was, for instance, the time a fellow he had
sent up to the pen stopped him in the street down at the Land-
ing and told him he was going to kill him. The Judge just laughed
and turned his back and walked away. The fellow took out a pistol
then and called to the Judge, two or three times. Finally the Judge
looked around. When he saw the man had a pistol and had it
pointing at him, the Judge turned right there and walked straight
at the man, not saying a word. He got right up to the man and took
the pistol away from him. What he did in the war, I never knew.

The night my mother and the Young Executive and I went to
dinner at his place, nearly fifteen years later, he dug up some of
the junk again. There were the Pattons, a couple who lived down
the Row, and a girl named Dumonde, whose presence I took to be
tribute to me, and Judge Irwin, and us. Digging up the ballista was,
I suppose, a tribute to me, too, though he always had shown a
tendency to instruct his guests in the art of war of the pregunpow-
der epochs. All during the meal it had been old times, which was
another tribute to me, for you come back to the place you have
been and they always start chewing over that bone: old times. Old
times, just before dessert, worked around to how I used to make
models with him. So he got up and went into the library and came
back with a ballista, about twenty inches long, and shoved his des-
sert to one side and set it up there on the table. Then he cocked it,
using the little crank on the draw drum to wind back the carriage,
just as though he hadn’t been strong enough to do it with a finger
or two all at once. Then he didn’t have anything to shoot. So he
rang for the black boy and got a roll. He broke open the roll and
removed a little hunk of the soft bread and tried to make a pellet
of it. It didn’t make a very good pellet, so he dipped it in water to
make it stick. He put it in the carriage, “Now,” he said, “it works
like this,” and tipped the trigger.

It worked. The pellet was heavy with a good soaking and the zip
hadn’t gone out of the ballista with the passage of the years, for the
next thing I knew there was an explosion in the chandelier and
Mrs. Patton screamed and spewed mint ice over her black velvet
and bits of glass showered down over the tablecloth and the big
bowl of japonicas. The Judge had made it dead center on an elec-
tric-light bulb. He had also fetclied down one of the crystal bangles
of the chandelier.

The Judge said he was very sorry about Mrs. Patton. He said that

129

he was a very stupid old man in his second childhood to be playing
with toys, and then sat up very straight in his chair to show what a
chest and pair of shoulders he still had. Mrs. Patton ate the rest of
the mint ice, punctuating her activity with distrustful glances at
the disgraced ballista. Then we all went back into the Judge’s li-
brary to wait for the coffee and the brandy bottle.

But I loitered behind in the dining room for a moment. I have
said that the zip hadn’t gone out of the ballista with the passage of
the years. But that was a misstatement of fact. It hadn’t had a
chance to. I went over to examine the thing, with a motive more
sentimental than scientific. But then I noticed the twists, which
gave it its zip. There are two twists of fiber on all those things, bal-
listas, some types of catapults, scorpions, and wild asses, through
each of which the butt of a propelling arm is adjusted to make, as
it were, half of the bow of a kind of supercrossbow. We used to
cheat by mixing in catgut and fine steel wire with the string of the
twists on our models to give more force. Now, as I looked at the
thing, I realized that the twists weren’t the old twists which I had
put in back in the dear dead days. Not by a damned sight. They
were practically new.

And all at once I had the sight of Judge Irwin sitting up nights,
back in the library, with catgut and steel wire and string and pliers
and scissors on the desk beside him, and with his high old red-
thatched head bent over, the yellow eyes gimleted upon the task.
And seeing that picture in my head, I felt sad and embarrassed. I
had never felt anything, one way or the other, about the Judge’s
making those things in the first place, years back. When I was a Rid
it seemed natural that anybody in his right mind would -want to
make them, and read books about them, and make maps and
models. And it had kept on seeming all right that the Judge had
made them. But the picture I now had in my head was different. I
felt sad and embarrassed and, somehow, defrauded.

So I joined the guests in the library and left a piece of Jack Bur-
den in the dining room, with the ballista, for good and all.

They were having coffee. All except the Judge, who was opening
up a bottle of brandy. He looked up as I came in, and said, “Been
looking at our old peashooter, huh?” He put the slightest emphasis
upon our,

“Yes,” I said.

The yellow eyes bored right into me for a second, and I knew he
knew what I’d found out. “I fiixed it up,” he said, and laughed the
most candid and disaiming laugh in the world. “The other day.
You know, an old fellow with nothing to do and nobody to talk to.

130

You can’t read law and history and Dickens ail the time. Or fish.”

I gidnned a grin which I somehow felt I had to grin as a tribute
to something, not specified in my mind. But I knew that the gi'in
was about as convincing as coid chicken broth in a boarding house.

Then I went over and sat beside the Dumonde girl, who had
been provided for my delight. She was a prettyish, dark girl, well
got-up but lacking something, too brittle and vivacious, with a trick
of lassoing )ou with her anxious brown eyes and fluttering the eye-
lids as she cinched the rope and then sa}ing what her mother had
told her ten years before to say, “Oh, Mr. Burden, they say you’re
in politics, oh, it must be just fascinating!” No doubt, her mother
had taught her that. Well, she was pushing thirty and it hadn’t
worked yet. But the eyelids were still busy.

“No, I’m not in politics,” I said. “I've just got a job.”

“Tell me about your job, Mr. Burden.”

“I’m an office boy,” I said.

“Oh, they say you’re very important, Mr. Burden. They say
you’re very influential. Oh, it must be fascinating. To be influen-
tial, Mr. Burden!”

“It’s news to me,” I said, and discovered that they were all look-
ing at me as though it had just dawned on them that I was sitting
there buck-naked on the couch beside Miss Dumonde, with a demi-
tasse on my knee. It’s the human fate. Every time some dame like
Miss Dumonde snags you and you have to start talking the way you
have to talk to dames like Miss Dumonde, the whole world starts
listening in. I saw the Judge smiling with what I took to be a venge-
ful relish.

Then he said, “Don’t let him kid you, Miss Dumonde. Jack is
very influential.”

“I knew it,” Miss Dumonde said. “It must be fascinating.”

“All right,” I said, “I’m influential. You got any pals in the pen
you tvant me to get a pardon for?” Then I thought: Wonderful
manners you got. Jack. You might at least smile if you^ve got to say
that So I smiled.

“Well, there’s going to be somebody in the pen,” old Mr. Patton
said, “before it’s over. What’s going on up there in the city. All
these—”

“George,” his wife breathed at him, but it didn’t do any good,
for Mr. Patton was the bluff, burly type, with lots of money and a
manly candor. He kept right on: “—yes, sir, all these wild goings-on.
Why, that fellow is giving this state away. Free this and free that
and free other. Every wool-hat jackass thinking the world is free

131

Who’s going to pay? That’s what I want to know? What does he say
to that, Jack?”

“I never asked him,” I said.

“Well, you ask him,” Mr. Patton said. “And ask him, too, how
much grabbing there is. All that money flowing, and don’t tell me
there’s not a grab. And ask him what he’s going to do when they
impeach him? Tell him there’s a constitution in this state, or was
before he blew it to hell. Tell him that.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said, and laughed, and then laughed again when
I thought how Willie would look if I did tell him.

“George,” the Judge said, “you're an old fog)'. Government is
committed these days to give services we never heard of when we
were growing up. The world’s changing.”

“It’s changed so much a fellow can step in and grab the whole
state. Give him another few years and nothing can blast him out.
He’ll have half the state on a pay roll and the other half will be
afraid to vote. Strong-arm, blackmail, God knows what.”

“He’s a hard man,” the Judge said. “He’s played it hard and
close. But there’s one principle he’s grasped: you don’t make
omelettes without breaking eggs. And precedents. He’s broken
plenty of eggs and he may make his omelettes. And remember, the
Supreme Court has backed him up on every issue raised to date.”

“Yeah, and it’s his court. Since he got Armstrong on, and Tal-
bott. And the issues raised. But what about the issues that haven’t
been raised? That people have been afraid to raise?”

“There’s a great deal of talk,” the Judge said calmly, “but we
don’t really know much.”

“I know he’s going to tax this state to death,” Mr. Patton said,
and shifted his big hams, and glared. And drive business out of
this state. Raising royalty on the state coal land. On the oil land.
On-”

“Yes, George,” the Judge laughed, “and he slammed an income
tax on you and me, too.”

“On the oil situation, now,” the Young Executive began, for the
sacred name of oil had been mentioned, “as I see it, the situation—”

Well, Miss Dumonde had certainly opened the corral gate when
she mentioned politics, and it was thunder of hoofs and swirl of
dust from then on, and I was sitting on the bare ground in the
middle of it. For a while it didn’t occur to me that there w^as any-
thing peculiar about the scene. Then it did occur to me. After all, I
did work for the fellow who had the tail and the cloven hoof and
this was, or had started out to be, a social occasion. I suddenly
remembered that fact and decided that the developments were

132

peculiar. Then I realized that they weren’t so peculiar, after all.
Mr. Patton, and the Young Executive, and Mrs. Patton, for she had
begun putting her oar in, and even the Judge, they all assumed that
even though I did work for Willie my heart W’as with them. I was
just picking up a little, or ma}be a lot, of change with Willie, but
my heart was in Burden’s Landing and they had no secrets from
me and they knew they couldn’t hurt my feelings. Ma\be they were
right. Maybe my heart was in Burden’s Landing. Ma^be they
couldn’t hurt my feelings. But I just broke in, after an hour of sit-
ting quiet and drinking in Miss Dumonde’s subtle scent, and said
something. I don’t recall w^hat I interrupted, but it all amounted to
the same thing anyway. I said, '‘Doesn’t it all boil down to this? If
the government of this state for quite a long time back had been
doing anything for the folks in it, would Stark have been able to
get out there with his bare hands and bust the boys? And would he
be having to make so many short cuts to get something done to
make up for the time lost all these years in not getting something
done? I’d just like to submit that question for the sake of argu-
ment.”

There wasn’t a sound for half a minute. Mr. Patton’s granite
visage seemed to lean toward me like a monument about to fall,
and the satchel under Mrs. Patton’s chin quivered like a tow sack
full of kittens, and the sound of the Young Executive’s adenoids
was plainly audible, and the Judge just sat, with his yellow eyes
working over the crowd, and my mother’s hands turned in her lap.
Then she said, “Why, Son, I didn’t know you— you felt that— that
way!”

“Why— er— no,” Mr. Patton said, “I didn’t realize you— er— ”

“I didn’t say I felt any way,” I said. “I just offered a proposition
for the sake of argument.”

“Argument! Argument!” burst out Mr. Patton, himself again. “It
doesn’t matter what kind of government this state’s had in the past.
They never had this kind. Nobody ever tried to grab the whole
damned state. Nobody ever—”

“It’s a very interesting proposition,” the Judge said, and sipped
his brandy.

And they were at it again, all except my mother, whose hands
kept turning slow in her lap, with the firelight exploding in the big
diamond which never came from the Scholarly Attorney. They kept
at it steady until it was time to go.

“Who is that Miss Dumonde?” I asked my mother late the next
afternoon, sitting in front of the fire.

133

“Mr. Orton’s sister’s child/' she said, “and shell inherit his
money.”

“Well,” I said, “somebod} ought to wait till she gets the dough
and then maixy her and drown her in the bathtub.”

“Don’t talk that my mother was saying.

“Don’t tvorry,” I said. “I’d like to drown her but I don’t want
her money. I’m not interested in money. If I wanted to I could
reach out any day and knock off ten thousand. Twenty thou-
sand. I—”

“Oh, Son—what Mr. Patton said—those people you’re wddi— Son,
now don’t get mixed up in any graft, now—”

“Graft is what he calls it when the fellows do it who don’t know
whicii fork to use.”

“It’s the same thing. Son— those people—”

“I don't know w^hat those people, as you call them, do. I’m very
-careful not to ever know w^hat anybody anywhere does any time.”

“Now, Son, don’t you, please don’t—”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t get mixed up in— in anything.”

“All I said was I could reach out and knock off ten thousand.
And not graft. Information. Information is money. But I told you
I’m not interested in money. Not the slightest. Willie isn’t either.”

“Willie?” she asked.

“The Boss. The Boss isn’t interested in money.”

“What’s he interested in, then?”

“He’s interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when
anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way
Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It’s only the halt
baked people like Mr. Patton who are interested in money. Even
the big boys who make a real lot of money aren’t interested in
money. Henry Ford isn’t interested in money. He’s interested in
Henry Ford and therefore he is a genius.”

She reached over and took my hand, and spoke earnestly to me.
“Don’t, Son, don’t talk that way,” she said.

“What way?”

“When you talk tliat way I don’t know what to think. I just don’t
know,” And she looked imploringly at me, with the firelight strik-
ing aaoss her cheek to make the hollow there hollower and hun-
grier. She laid her free hand on the hand of mine she held, and
when a woman makes that kind of a sandwich out of one of your
hands it is always a prelude to something. Which, in this case,
was: “Why don’t you, Son— why don’t you— settle down— why don’t
you marry some nice girl and—”

184

“I tried that,” I offered. *'And if )Ou tried to rig anything for me
with that Dumonde you sure rang the lemons.”

She was looking at me with a growing, searching, discovering look
from her too bright eyes, like somebod} puzzling something out of
distance. Then she said, '‘Son— Son, \ou were sort of funny last
night— you didn’t enter into things— then the tone you took—”

“All right,” I said.

“You weren’t like }om-'self, like you used to be, you—”

“If I’m ever like I used to be I’ll shoot m}self,” I said, “and if I
embarrassed you before those half-wit Pattons and that half-wit
Dumonde, I’m sorry.”

“Judge Irwin—” she began.

“Leave him out of it,” I said. “He’s different.”

“Oh, Son,” she exclaimed, “what makes )ou be that Tvay? You
didn’t embarrass me, but what makes you that way? It’s those peo-
ple—what you do— w^hy don’t you settle down— get a decent job-
judge Irwin, Theodore, they could get you a—”

I snatched my hand out of the sandwich she had made, and said,
“I don’t want anything in God’s world out of them. Or anybody.
And I don’t want to settle down, and I don’t want to get married,
and I don’t want any other job, and as for money—”

“Son— Son— ” she said, and turned her hands together on her lap.

“And as for money, I don’t want any more than I’ve got. And
besides I don’t have to worry about that. You’ve got enough—” I
got up from the couch and lighted a cigarette and flung the match
stub into the fire— “enough to leave both Theodore and me pretty
well fixed.”

She didn’t move or say anything. She just looked up at me, and
I saw that her eyes had tears coming into them, and that she loved
me, for I was her son. And that Time didn’t mean anything, but
that the lifted face with the bright, too large eyes was an old face.
The skin lanked down from the cheek hollows under the bright
eyes.

“Not that I want your money,” I said.

She reached out with one hand, in a tentative, humble way, and
took my right hand, not by my hand itself but just by the fingers,
crumpling them together.

“Son,” she said, “you know whatever I’ve got is yours. Don’t you
know that?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Don’t you know that?” she said, and swung on to my fingers as
though they were the end of a rope somebody

*‘A11 right/' I heard my voice say, ana telt my fingers twitching
to get away, but at the same time I felt my heart suddenly go soft
and fluid in my chest like a melting snowball you squash in your
hand. “Fm sorry I talked that way,” I said, “but, damn it, why can’t
we just stop talking? Why can’t I just come home for a day or two
and us not talk, not open our mouths?”

She didn’t answer, but kept on holding my fingers. So I released
my fingers, and said, “I’m going up and take a bath before dinner,”
and started toward the door. I knew that she didn’t turn her head
to watch me go out of the room, but as I crossed the room I felt as
though they had forgotten to ring down the curtain at the end of
something and a thousand eyes were on my back and the clapping
hadn’t started. Ma\be the bastards didn’t know it was over. Maybe
they didn’t know it was time to clap.

I went upstairs and lay in the bathtub with the hot water up to
my ears and knew that it was over. It was over again. I would get
in my car, right after dinner, and drive like hell toward town over
the new concrete slab between the black, mist-streaked fields, and
get to town about midnight and go up to my hotel room where
nothing was mine and nothing knew my name and nothing had a
thing to say to me about anything that had ever happened.

I lay in the tub and heard a car drive up and knew that it was
the Young Executive and knew that he would come in the front
door and that the woman on the couch would get up and with a
quick step and small, squared, gallant shoulders carry the old face
to him like a present.

And, by Goi he’d better look grateful.

Two hours later I was in my car and Burden’s Landing was be-
hind me, and the bay, and the windshield wipers were making their
busy little gasp and click like something inside you which had bet-
ter not stop. For it was raining again. The drops swung and swayed
down out of the dark into my headlights like a bead portiere of
bright metal beads which the car kept shouldering through.

There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the
rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on
the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone
in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of
relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there
wouldn’t be any you because what you do, which is what you are,
only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very com-
forting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone,
for then you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can

136

really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you
There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that
frail tliread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that fila-
ment, that nexus, which isn’t really there, between the you which
you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when
'►ou get to the other place.

You ought to invite those two you’s to the same party, some time.
Or you might have a family reunion for all the you’s with barbecue
under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would
say to each other.

But meanwhile, there isn’t either one of them, and I am in the
car in the rain at night.

This is why I am in the car: Thirty-seven years before, about
1896, die stocky, sober, fortyish man, with the steel-rimmed spec-
tacles and the dark suit, who was the Scholarly Attorney, had gone
up to a lumber town in south Arkansas to interview witnesses and
conduct an investigation for a big timberland litigation. It was not
much of a town, I guess. Shacks, a boarding house for the bosses
and engineers, a post office, a company commissary— all rising out
of the red mud— and around them the stumps stretching ofi^ and off
yonder a cow standing among the stumps, and the scream of saws
like a violated nerve in the center of your head, and in the air and
in your nostrils the damp, sweet-sick smell of sawn timber.

I have not seen the town. I have never even set foot inside the
State of Arkansas. But I have seen the town in my head. And stand-
ing on the steps of the commissary is a girl wdth yellow hair hang-
ing in two heavy braids and with large blue eyes and with the hint
of a delicate, famished hollow in each cheek. Let us say that she
is wearing a lettuce-green gingham dress, for lettuce-green is a nice,
fresh color for a blond girl to be wearing as she stands in the morn-
ing sunlight on the commissary steps and listens to the saws scream
and watches a stocky man in a dark suit come picking his way
soberly through the red mud left by the last big spring rain.

The girl is standing on the commissary steps because her father
clerks in the commissary for the company. That is what I know
about her father.

The man in the dark suit stays in the town for two months trans-
acting his legal business. In the evening, toward sunset, he and the
girl walk down the street of the town, now dusty, and move out
beyond the houses, where the stumps are. I can see them standing
in the middle of the ruined land, against the background of the
brass-and-blood-coiored summer sunset of Arkansas. I cannot make
out what they say to each other.

137

Wten utie man has finished his business and leaves the town, he
takes the girl with him. He is a kind, innocent, shy man, and as he
sits beside the girl on the red plush of the train seat, he holds her
hand in his, stiffly and carefully as though he might drop and break
something valuable.

He puts her in a big white house, which his gi-andfather had
built. In front of it is the sea. That is new to her. Every day she
spends a great deal of time looking at it. Sometimes she goes down
to the beach and stands there, alone, looking out at the lift of the
horizon.

I know that that is true, the business of looking at the sea, for my
mother once, years later when I was a big boy, said to me, “When
I first came here I used to stand down at the gate and just look out
over the water. I spent hours doing it, and didn't know why. But
it wore off. It wore off a long time before you were born, Son."

The Scholarly Attorney went to Arkansas and the girl was on the
steps of the commissary, and that is why I was in the car, in the
rain, at night.

I entered the lobby of my hotel just about midnight. The clerk
saw me enter, beckoned to me, and gave me a number to call.
“They been giving the operator prostration," he said. I didn't
recognize the number. “Said ask for a party named Miss Burke,"
the clerk added.

So I didn’t bother to go upstairs before calling, but stepped into
one of the lobby booths. “Markheim Hotel," the crisp voice
answered, and I asked for Miss Burke, and there was Sadie’s voice
saying, “Well, by God, it's time you got here. I called Burden's
Landing God knows when and they said you’d left. WTiat did you
do, walk?"

“I’m not Sugar-Boy," I said.

“Well, get on over here. Suite 905. Hell has popped.”

I hung the receiver up very deliberately, walked over to the desk
and asked the clerk to give my bag to a bellhop, got a drink out of
the lobby cooler, bought a couple of packs of cigarettes from the
sleepy sister at the lobby stand, opened a package and lighted my-
self one, and stood there to take a long drag and look at the blank
lobby, as though there weren’t any place in the world where I had
to go.

But there was such a place. And I went there. Quick, once I
started.

Sadie was sitting in the outside room of Suite 905, over by the
telephone stand, with a tray full of cigarette butts in front of her

138

and a coronal of smoke re^'oI^vinLg slowly ab«<»ut her head of hackees^
off black hair.

“Well/’ she said in the tome of the ranattron of a home for way-
ward girls from inside tbkt smoke senreen, but I didn’t answer. I
walked straight over to her, past th^e forrwtiojff Sugar-Boy, who snored
in a chair, and grabhed a ha^ndiul of tluat >irild black Irish hair to
steady her head and kissed tier saracEc on idie forehead before she
could God-damn me.

Which she did.

“Yon have no idea why I did tlia_C I sai®.

“I don’t care, just so it isn’t at habLt/

“It was nothing personal,” I ssid- ‘Xt wvas just because your name
is not Dumonde.'*

“Your name is going to he mmdifyou get on in there,*’ she
said, and twitched her head in the diirec *tiom of a door.

“Maybe I’ll resign,” Z said in my ivLinusey,^ then for a split second,
with a surprising flash in my head tike tine Hash of a photographer's
bulb, I thought maybe I would.

Sadie was just about to say soinethEng^,r hen the telephone rang
and she sprang at it as though, sbie’di stiramfles it with her bare hands,
and snatched up the receiver. As I wadkesdt toward the inner door, I
heard her saying, “So you got him. AlJriiflit, get him to town here.
. . . To hell with his wife. TeLl faLim hoe'll be sicker’n she is if he
don’t come. . . . Yeah, tell hiiiriL-’'

Then I knocked on the inner door, hesari a voice, and went in.

I saw the Boss in shirt sleeves^ cockesd lack in an easy chair with
his sock-feet propped on a straiglit cha.ir iafiront of him, and his tie
askew, and his eyes hugging out: and a Bretlinger out in the air in
front of him as though it were tlae stock md ^ bull whip. Then I saw
what the snapper of ttie hull whip woixild have been flicking the
flies ofl of if that forefinger of tbie Boss h^ad been the stock of a bull
whip: it was Mr. 33yram B. W7hit:e, Sta’te ^Auditor, and his long bony
paraffin-colored face was cozing a few pai-iiful drops of moisture
and his eyes reached out and. grubbed la.eliJce the last hope.

I took in the fact that I was intruding;.

“Excuse me,”! said, and startled to k*.ck «out of the door.

“Shut the door and sit dowoi,’^ theBosi2Ssa.Jd, and his voice moved
right on without any punctuation to asoimetliing it had been saying
before my entrance, and the Eorefiager simapgied, “—and you can just
damned well remeirrber you aren’t siapposed to get rich. A fellow
like you, fifty years old and gut-shot duxiH teeeth gone and never had
a dime, if God-AImigh-ty had eveJt imteendied you to be rich he'd
dooe it long back. Loai at youirselfjcSarsain iti You to figure you’re

supposed to be rich, it is plain blasphemy. Look at yourself. Ain’t
it a fact?” And the forefinger leveled at Mr. B\Tam B. White.

But Mr. M^ite did not answer. He just stood there in his unhap-
piness and looked at the finger.

'*God damn it, has the cat got your tongue?” the Boss demanded.
“Can’t you answer a civil question?”

“Yes,” Mr. White managed with gray lips that scarcely moved.

“Speak up, don’t mumble, say, ‘It's a fact, it’s a blasphemous
fact/ ” the Boss insisted, still pointing the finger.

Mr. White’s lips went grayer, and the voice was less than loud
and clear, but he said it. Every word.

“All right, that’s better,” the Boss said. “Now you know what
you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to stay pore and take orders.
I don’t care about your chastity, which from the looks of you you
don’t have any trouble keeping plenty of, but I mean it’s poverty
and obedience and don’t you forget it. Especially the last. There’ll
be a little something coming to you now and then in the way of
sweetening, but Duffy’ll tend to that. Don’t you go setting up on
your own any more. There just aren’t going to be any one-man
bonanzas. You got that? Speak up!”

“Yes,” Mr. White said.

“Louder! And say, 1 got that/ ”

He said it. Louder.

“All right,” the Boss said, “I’m going to stop this impeachment
business for you. But don’t go and get the notion it’s because I love
you. It’s just because those fellows can’t get the idea they can just
up and knock off somebody. Are my motives clear?”

“Yes,” Mr. White said.

“All right, then sit down over there at that desk.” And the Boss
pointed at the little desk with the pen tray and telephone. “Get a
sheet of plain paper out of the drawer and take your pen in hand.”
He waited until Mr. White had glided spectrally across the room
and settled himself at the desk, making himself remarkably small,
like the genie getting ready to go back into the bottle, drawing him-
self into a hunch as though he wanted to assume the prenatal posi-
tion and be little and warm and safe in the dark. But the Boss was
saying, “Now write what I say.” Then he began to dictate: “Dear
Governor Stark,— because of ill health— which renders it difficult for
me to attend conscientiously—” The Boss interrupted himself, say-
ing, “Be sure you put that conscientiously in now, you wouldn’t
want to leave that out,” and then continued in the business voice—
“to the duties of my position as Auditor— I wish to offer my resigna-
tion—to take effect as soon after the above date— as you can relieve

140

me/’ He eyed the hunched figure, and added, “Respectfully }ours/’

There was silence, and the pen scratched across the paper, then
stopped. But Mr. "White’s tall, bald, narrow head remained bent
over close to the paper, as though he were nearsighted, or praying,
or had lost whatever it is in the back of a neck that keeps a head
up straight.

The Boss studied the back of the bent head. Then he demanded,
“Did you sign it?’’

“No,” the voice said.

“Well, God damn it, sign!” Then when the pen had again
stopped scratching across the paper, “Don’t put any date on it. I
can fill that in when I want.”

Mr. White’s head did not lift. From where I sat I could see that
his hand still held the pen staff, the point still touching the paper
at the end of the last letter of his name.

“Bring it here,” the Boss said.

Mr. White rose and turned, and I looked at his still bent-over
face to see what I could see. His eyes didn’t have any appeal in
them now as he swung them past me. They didn’t have anything in
them. They were as numb and expressionless as a brace of gray
oysters on the half shell.

He held out the sheet to the Boss, who read it, folded it, tossed
it over to the foot of the bed near which he sat. “Yeah,” he said,
“I’ll fill in the date when I need to. If I need to. It all depends on
you. But you know. Byram— why I didn’t get one of those undated
resignations from you from the start I don’t know. I got a stack of
’em. But I just misjudged you. I just took one look at you, and said,
‘Shucks, there ain’t any harm in the old bugger.’ I figured you were
so beat down you’d know the good Lord never meant for you to
be rich. I figured you never would try to pull any shines. Shucks,

I figured you didn’t have any more initiative than a wet washrag
dropped on the bathroom floor in a rooming house for old maids.

I was wrong, Byram, I am free to confess. Fifty years old and all ;
that time just waiting your one big chance. Waiting for your ship
to come in. Saving up one little twdtch and try like a one-nut for
his wedding night. Waiting for the big chance, and this was it, and
everything was going to be different. But—” and he w^hipped the
forefinger at Mr. White again— “you were wrong, B^ram. This was
not your chance. And there never will be one. Not for the likes of
you. Now get out!”

Mr. White got out. One second he was there, and the next second
he wasn’t there, and there had been scarcely a sound for his pass-
ing. There was just the empty space which had been occupied by

141

the empty space which went by the name of Mr. B)Tam B. White.

“■Well,” I said to the Boss, “you gave }oursel£ a good time.”

“Damn it,” he said, “it’s just something in their eyes makes you
do ii. This fellow now, he’d lick spit, and }ou can see that, and it
makes }ou do it.”

“Yeali,” I said, “it looks like he’s a long worm with no turning,
all right.”

“I gave him every chance,” the Boss said glumly. “Every chance.
He didn’t have to say what I told him to say. He didn’t have to
listen to me. He could have just walked out the door and kept on
w'alking. He could ha\e put a date on that resignation and handed
it to me. He could have done a dozen things. But did he? Hell, no.
Not Byram, and he just stands there and his eyes blink right quick
like a dog’s do wdien he leans up against }Our leg before you hit
him, and, by God, you have the feeling if you don’t do it you won’t
be doing God’s will. You do it because you ai'e helping B}Tam ful-
fill his nature.”

“Not that it’s any of my business,” I said, “but what’s ail the
shouting about?”

“Didn’t you read the paper?”

“No, I was on vacation.”

“And Sadie didn’t tell you?”

“Just got here,” I said.

“Well, Byram rigged him up a nice little scheme to get rich. Got
himself a tie-in 'with a realty outfit and fixed things up with Hamill
in the Tax Lands Bureau. Pretty, only they wanted it all to them-
selves and somebody got sore at not being cut in, and squawked
to the MacMurfee boys in the Legislature. And if I get my hands
on who it was—”

“Was what?”

“Squawked to the MacMurfee outfit. Ought to taken it up with
DuSy. Everybody know^s he’s supposed to handle complaints. And
now we got this impeachment business.”

“Of who?”

“Byram.”

“What’s happened to Hamill?”

“He’s moved to Cuba. You know, better climate. And, from re»
ports, he moved fast. Duff)' went around this morning, and Hamill
caught a train. But we got to handle this impeachment.”

“I don’t think they could put it tlirough.”

“They ain’t even going to try. You let a thing like that get
started and no telling what’ll happen. The time to stomp ’em is

142

now. I’ve got bo)s out picking up soreheads and wobblies and get-
ting ’em to town. Sadie’s been on the phone all day taking the
news- Some of the birds are hiding out, for the word must have got
round by this time, but the boys are running 'em down. Brought
in three this afternoon, and we gave ’em what it took. But we had
something ready on them all. You ought to’ve seen Jefi Hopkins’s
face when he found out I knew about his pappy selling likker out
of that little one-horse drugstore he’s got over in Talmadge and
then forging prescriptions for the record. Or Martten’s when he
found out I Icnew how the bank over in Okaloosa holds a mortgage
on his place falling due in about five weeks. Well—” and he wrig-
gled his toes comfortably inside of the socks— “I quieted their nerves.
It’s the old tonic, but it still soothes.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Get over to Harmonville tomorrow and see if you can beat
some sense into Sim Harmon’s head.”

“That all?”

Before he could answer Sadie popped her head in the door, and
said the boys had brought in Witherspoon, who was a representa-
tive from the north tip of the state.

“Put him in the other room,” the Boss said, “and let him stew.”
Then, as Sadie popped out again, he turned to me and answered
my question. “All, except get me together all you have on A1 Coyle
before you leave town. The boys are trying to run him down and
I want to be heeled when they book him.”

I said, and stood up.

He looked at me as though he were about to say something. For
a second I had the notion that he was working himself up to it,
and I stood in front of my chair, waiting. But Sadie stuck her head
in. “Mr. Miller would like to see you,” she said to the Boss, and
didn’t give the impression of glad tidings.

“Send him in,” the Boss ordered, and I could tell that, no mat-
ter what he had had on his mind to say to me a second before, he
had something else on it now. He had Hugh Miller, Harvard Law
School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure
heart. Attorney General, on his mind.

“He won’t like it,” I said.

“No,” he said, “he won’t.”

And then in the doorway stood the tall, lean, somewhat stooped
man, with swarthy face and unkempt dark hair and sad eyes under
black brows, and with a Phi Beta Kappa key slung across his untidy
blue serge. He stood there for a second, blinking the sad eyes, as

though be had come out of darkness into a sudden light, or had
stumbled into the wong room. He looked like the wong thing
to be coming through that door, all right.

The Boss had stood up and padded across in his sock-feet, hold-
ing out his hand, saying, “Hello, Hugh.”

Hugh Miller shook hands, and stepped into the room, and I
started to edge out the door. Then I caught the Boss’s eye, and he
nodded, quick, toward my chair. So I shook hands with Hugh
Miller, too, and sat back down.

“Have a seat,” the Boss said to Hugh Miller.

“No, thanks, Willie,” Hugh Miller replied in his slow solemn
way. “But you sit down, Willie.”

The Boss dropped back into his chair, cocked his feet up again,
and demanded, “What’s on your mind?”

“I reckon you know,” Hugh Miller said.

“I reckon I do,” the Boss said.

“You are saving White’s hide, aren’t you?”

“I don’t give a damn about White’s hide,” the Boss said. “I’m
saving something else.”

“He’s guilty.”

“As hell,” the Boss agreed cheerfully. “If the category of guilt
and innocence can be said to have any relevance to something like
Byram B. White.”

“He’s guilty,” Hugh Miller said.

“My God, you talk like Byram was human! He’s a thing! You
don’t prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes
a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed ByTam. I fixed him so his un-
born great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary
and not know why. Boy, it will be the shock in the genes. Hell,
Byram is just something you use, and he’ll sure be useful from
now on.”

“That sounds fine, Willie, but it just boils down to the fact
you’re saving White’s hide.”

“White’s hide be damned,” the Boss said, “I’m saving something
else. You let that gang of MacMurfee’s boys in the Legislature get
the notion they can pull something like this and there’s no telling
where they’d stop. Do you think they like anything that’s been
done? The extraction tax? Raising the royalty rate on state land?
The income tax? The highway program? The Public Health Bill?”

“No, they don’t,” Hugh Miller admitted. “Or rather, the people
behind MacMurfee don’t like it.”

“Do you like it?”

144

**Yes/' Hugh Miller said, ‘1 like it. But I can’t say I like some
of the stuff around it.”

“Hugh,” the Boss said, and grinned, “the trouble with }ou is
you are a lawyer. You are a damned fine lawyer.”

“You’re a law)er,” Hugh Miller said.

“No,” the Boss corrected, “I’m not a lawyer. I know some law.
In fact, I know a lot of law. And I made me some mone) out of
law. But I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I can see W’hat the law is
like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks
in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to
cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and some-
body is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is
like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is
always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbones to
the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing
humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make
up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you
would have done something different. Do you think half the things
I’ve done were clear, distinct, and simple m the constitution of this
state?”

“The Supreme Court has ruled—” Hugh Miller began.

“Yeah, and they ruled because I put ’em there to rule it, and
they saw what had to be done. Half the things weren't in the con-
stitution but they are now, by God. And how did they get there?
Simply because somebody did ’em.”

The blood began to climb up in Hugh Miller’s face, and he
shook his head just a little, just barely, the way a slow animal does
when a fly skims by. Then he said, “There’s nothing in the consti-
tution says that Byram B. White can commit a felony with im-
punity.”

“Hugh,” the Boss began, soft, “don’t you see that Byram doesn’t
mean a thing? Not in this situation. What they’re after is to break
the administration. They don’t care about Byram, except so far as
it’s human nature to hate to think somebody else is getting some-
thing when you aren’t. What they care about is undoing what this
administration has done. And now is the time to stomp ’em. And
when you start out to do something—” he sat up straight in the
chair now, with his hands on the overstuffed sides, and thrust his
head forward at Hugh Miller— “you got to use what you’ve got.
You got to use fellows like Byram, and Tiny Duffy, and that scum
down in the Legislature. You can’t make bricks without straw, and
most of the time all the straw you got is secondhand straw from

145

the cowpen. And it you think you can make it any different, you're
crazy as a hoot owl.”

Hugh Miller straightened his shoulders a little. He did not look
at tlie Boss but at the wail beyond the Boss. “I am offering my
resignation as Attorney General,” he said. “You will have it in
WTiting, by messenger, in the morning.”

“You took a long time to do it,” the Boss said softly. “A long
time, Hugh, What made you take such a long time?”

Hugh iMiller didn’t answer, but he did move his gaze from the
wall to the Boss’s face.

“I’ll tell you, Hugh,” the Boss said. “You sat in your law office
fifteen years and watched the sons-of*bitches warm chairs in this
state and not do a thing, and the rich get richer and the pore get
porer. Then I came along and slipped a Louisville Slugger in your
hand and whispered low, ‘You want to step in there and lay round
you a little?’ And you did. You had a wonderful time. You made
the fur fly and you put nine tin-horn grafters in the pen. But you
never touched w^hat was behind ’em. The law isn’t made for that.
All you can do about that is take the damned government away
from the behind guys and keep it away from ’em. W'hatever way
you can. You know that down in your heart. You want to keep
your Harv'ard hands clean, but way down in your heart you know
I’m telling the truth, and you’re asking the benefit of somebody
getting his little patties potty-black. You know you’re welching if
you pull out. That,” he said, softer than ever, and leaned toward
Hugh Miller, peering up at him, “is why it took you so long to
do it. To pull out.”

Hugh Miller looked down at him a half minute, down into the
beefy upturned face and the steady protruding eyes. There was a
shadowed, puzzled expression on Hugh Miller’s face, as though he
were trying to read something in a bad light, or in a foreign lan-
guage he didn’t know very well. Then he said, “My mind is made
up,’'

“I know your mind’s made up,” the Boss said. “I know I couldn’t
change your mind, Hugh.” He stood up in front of his chair,
hitched his trousers up, the way a fellow has to who is putting it
on some around the middle, and sock-footed over to Hugh Miller.
**Too bad,” he said. “You and me make quite a team. Your brains
and my brawn,”

Hugh Miller gave something which resembled an incipient smile.

“No hard feelings?” the Boss said, and stuck out his hand.

Hugh Miller took it.

146

“If you don’t give up likker, you might drop in and ha've a drinl*
wth me some time,” the Boss said. “I won’t talk politics.”

“All right,” Hugh Miller said, and turned to'^v'ai'd the door.

He had just about made the door, when the Boss said, “Hugh."
Hugh Miller stopped and looked back.

“You’re leaving me all alone,” the Boss said, in semicomic woe,
“with the sons-of-bitches. Mine and the other fellow’s.”

Hugh Miller smiled in a stiff, embarrassed way, shook his head,
said, “Hell —Willie—” let his voice trail off without ever saying what
he had started to say, and then Harvard Law School, Lafayette
Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands and pure heart, was with
us no longer.

The Boss sank down on the foot of the bed, heaved his left ankle
up over his right knee; and while he meditatively scratched the
left foot, the way a farmer does when he takes off his shoes at night,
he stared at the closed door.

“With the sons-of-bitches,” he said, and let the foot slip off the
knee and plop to the floor, while he still stared at the door.

I stood up again. It was my third try for getting out of the place
and getting back to my hotel for some sleep. The Boss could sit
up all night, night after night, and never show it, and that fact was
sure hell on his associates. I edged toward the door again, but the
Boss swung his stare to me and I knew something was coming. So
I just stopped and waited for it, while the stare worked over my
face and tried to probe around in the gray stuff inside my head,
like a pair of forceps.

Then he said, “You think I ought to thrown White to the
wolves?”

“It’s a hell of a time to be asking that question,” I said.

“You think I ought?”

Ought is a funny word,” I said. “If you mean, to win, then time
will tell. If you mean, to do right, then nobody will ever be able
to tell you.”

“What do you think?”

“Thinking is not my line,” I said, “and Td advise you to stop
thinking about it because you know damned well what you are
going to do. You are going to do what you are doing.”

“Lucy is figuring on leaving,” he said calmly, as though that
answered something I had said.

“Well, I’m damned,” I said, in genuine surprise, for I had Lucy
figured as the long-suffering type on whose bosom repentant tears
always eventually fall. Very eventually. Then my glance strayed to

147

itc closed door, beyond which Sadie Burke sat in front of the
telephone with that pair of black bitunainous eyes in the middle
of the pocked face and cigarette smoke tangled in that wild black
hacked-off Irish hair like morning mist in a pine thicket.

He caught my glance at the door. “No/' he said, “it's not that.*'

“Well, that would be enough by ordinary standards," I said.

“She didn't know. Not that I know of."

“She’s a woman,” I said, “and they can smell it.”

“That wasn’t it,” he said. “She said if I took care of Byram White
she would leave me.”

“Looks like everybody is trying to run your business for you.”

“God damn it!” he said, and came up off the bed, and paced
savagely across the caipet for four paces, and swung, and paced
again, and seeing that motion and the heavy sw^ay of the head when
he turned, I thought back to the nights when I had heard the
pacing in the next room in those jerkw^ater hotels over the state,
back in the days when the Boss had been Willie Stark, and Willie
Stark had been the sucker with the high-school-debater speech full
of facts and figures and the kick-me sign on his coattails.

Well, I was seeing it now— the lunging, taut motion that had then
been on the other side of the wall, in the dry-goods-box little hotel
room. Well, it was out o£ that room now. It was prowling the veldt.

“God damn it!” he said again, “they don’t know a thing about it,
they don’t know how’’ it is, and you can't tell 'em.”

He paced back and forth a couple of times more, then said,
“They don't know.”

He swung again, paced, and stopped, his head thrust out toward
me. “You know what I'm going to do? Soon as I bust the tar out
of that gang.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know.”

“I’m going to build me the God-damnedest, biggest, chromium-
platedest, formaldehyde-stinkingest free hospital and health center
the All-Father ever let live. Boy, I tell you, I'm going to have a
cage of canaries in every room that can sing Italian grand opera
and there ain’t going to be a nurse hasn't won a beauty contest at
Atlantic City and every bedpan will be eighteen-carat gold and by
God, every bedpan will have a Swiss music-box attachment to play
TTurkey in the Straw’ or ‘The Sextet from Lucia,’ take your choice.”

“That wdll be swell,” I said.

“I'll do it,” he said. “You don’t believe me, but I’m going to
do it.”

“I believe every word of it,” I said.

I was dead for sleep. I stood there, rocking on my heels, and

148

through the haze I watched him pace and swing and lunge, ana
swa) his big head, witli the hair coming down to his eyes.

I supposed then that it was a wonder that Lucy Stark hadn’t
packed her suitcase a long time before. I didn’t see how she didn’t
know about something which could scarcely be called a secret.
When It began I never knew. But it was already full blown when
I found out about it. I’he Boss went up to Chicago on a little
piece of private business, about six or eight months after he got
to be Governor, and took me with him. Up there a fellow named
Josh Conklin did us the towm, and he w’-as the man to do it, a big,
burly fellow, with prematurely w^hite hair and a red face and black,
beetling eyebrows and a dress suit that fitted him like a corset and
a trick apartment like a movie set and an address book an inch
thick. He -wasn’t the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation
of it, which is frequently better than the real thing, for the real
thing can relax but the imitation can’t afford to and has to spend
all the time being just one cut more real than the real thing, with
money no object. He took us to a night club where they rolled out
a sheet of hoiiest-to-God ice on the floor and a bevy of “Nordic
Nymphs” in silver gee-strings and silver brassieres came skating out
on real skates to whirl and fandango and cavort and sway to the
music under the housebroke aurora borealis with the skates flash-
ing and the white knees flashing and white arms serpentining in
the blue light, and the little twin, hard-soft columns of muscle and
flesh up the backbones of the bare backs swaying and working in
a beautiful reciprocal motion, and w^hat was business under the
silver brassieres vibrating to music, and the long unbound un-
snooded silver innocent Swedish hair trailing and floating and
■whipping in the air.

It took the boy from Mason City, who had never seen any ice
except the skim-ice on the horse trough. “Jesus,” the boy from
Mason City said, in unabashed admiration. And then, “Jesus.” And
he kept swallowing hard, as though he had a sizable chunk of dry
corn pone stuck in his throat.

It w^as over, and Josh Conklin said politely, “How did you like
that. Governor?”

“They sure can skate,” the Governor said.

Then one of the Swedish-haired nymphs came out of the dress-
ing room with her skates off and a silver cloak draped over her bare
shoulders, and came over to our table. She w^as a friend of Josh
Conklin’s, and a very nice friend to have even if the hair had not
come from Sweden but from the drugstore. Well, she had a friend

149

in tlie act, so she got her friend, who quickly made friends with
the Governor, who, for the rest of the stay in Chicago, practicall)
di'opped out of my life except for the period e\ery night when the
skating going on. Then he’d be sitting there watching the
gyrating, and swallowing on the chunk of dry corn pone stuck in
his throat. Then when the last act w^as over he’d say, “Good night,
Jack,” and he and the friend of the friend of Josh Conklin would
head off into the night.

I don’t know that Lucy ever knew about the skating rink, but
Sadie did. For Sadie had channels of information closed to the
home-maker t\pe. "IVhen the Boss and I got back home, and the
Nordic Nymphs were but a fond memor\, a soft sweet spot in the
heart like the bruised place in a muskmelon, it was Sadie who
raised the se\en \arieties of Hibernian hell. The very morning the
Boss and I hit town, I heai'd rumblings from inside the Boss’s office
as I stood in the outer room chatting with the girl who was the
receptionist and catching up with the gossip. I noticed the racket
inside, a noise like somebody slamming a book on a desk and then
a voice, Sadie’s voice. “What’s going on?” I asked the girl.

“Yeah, you tell me what went on in Chicago,” the girl said.

“Oh,” exclaimed I in my innocence, “so that is it.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, mimicking me, “that was it, and how!”

I retired to the door of my cubbyhole, which opened off the out-
side room. I was standing just inside, with my door wide open,
when Sadie burst out of the Boss’s door about the way one of the
big cats, no doubt, used to bounce out of the hutch at the far end
of the arena and head for the Christian martyr. Her hair was flying
with distinct life and her face was chalk-white with the pock mai'ks
making it look like riddled plaster, like, say, a plaster-of-Paris mask
of Medusa which some kid has been using as a target for a BB gun.
But in the middle of the plaster-of-Paris mask was an event which
had nothing whatsoever to do witli plaster of Paris: her eyes, and
they were a twin disaster, they were a black explosion, they were
a conflagration. She was running a head of steam to bust the rivets,
and die way she snatched across the floor you could heai* the seams
pop in her skirt.

Then she caught sight of me, and without change of pace swung
straight into my room and slammed the door behind her.

“The son-of-a-bitch,” she said, and stood there panting and glar-
ing at me,

“You needn’t blame me,” I said.

“The son-of-a-bitch,” she iterated, glaring, ‘Til kill him, I swear
to God I’ll kill him.”

150

•'You set a high valuation on something/’ J said '

‘111 ruin him, 111 drive him out of tins state, X swear to God
The son-of-a-bitch to two>time me after all IVe done for him.
listen—’’ she said, and grabbed a handful ot my lapels in each of
her strong hands and shook me. (Her hands were squarish and
strong and hard like a man's.) ‘'Listen—” she repeated.

“You needn’t choke me/' I protested peevishly, “and I don't want
to listen. I know too God-damned much now.” And I vmsn't jok-
ing. I didn't want to listen. The world was full of things I didn’t
w^ant to know.

“Listen—” and she shook me— “who made that son-of-a-bitch what
he is today? Who made him Governor? Who took him when he
was the Sap of the Year and put him in big time? Who gave it to
him, play by play so he couldn’t lose?”

“I reckon you mean for me to say you did.”

“And it’s the truth,” she said, “and he goes and two-times me,
the-”

“No,” I said, trying to get loose from the grip on my lapels, “he
was two-timing Lucy, so you need some other kind of arithmetic
for what he was doing to you. But I don’t know w^hether you mul-
tiply or divide in a case like this.”

“Lucy I” she burst out from lips that coiled and contorted. “Lucy
—she’s a fool. She had her way and he'd be in Mason City slopping
the hogs right now, and he knows it. He knows what she’d do for
him. If he listened to her. She had her chance, she—” She simply
stopped for breath, but you could see the words still blazing on in
her head while she gasped for air.

“I see you seem to think Lucy is on the way out,” I said.

“Lucy—” she said, and stopped, but the tone said everything
there was to say about Lucy, who was a country girl, and had gone
to a hick Baptist college w^here they believed in God, and had
taught the little towheaded snots in the Mason County school, and
had married Willie Stark and given him a kid, and had missed
her chance. Then she added, suddenly quiet, in a grim matter-of-
factness, “Give him time— he'll ditch her, the son-of-a-bitch.”

“You ought to know,” I said, simply because I couldn’t resist the
logic of the proposition, but I hadn’t got it out before she slapped
me. WHiich is what you ask for when you start mixing into affairs,
public or private.

“It’s the wrong guy,” I said, fingering my cheek aijd backing off
a step from the heat, for she was about to blaze, “I'm not the hero
of the piece.”

Then she wasn’t about to blaze, at all She stood there in a kind

151

of heBX} numbness inside tfie sagging clothes. I saw a tear gather
at the inner corner of each eye, gather very slowly and swollenly
and then run down with the precision of a tiny mechanical toy,
one on each side of the slightly pitted nose, until they simulta-
neously arrived at the smear of dark lipstick, and spread. I saw the
tongue come out and fastidiously touch the upper lip as though to
sample the salt

She was looking straight at me all the time as though if she
looked hard enough she might see the answer to something.

Then she went past me to the wall, where a mirror hung, and
stared into the mirror, putting her face up close to the mirror and
turning it a little from side to side, slowly. I couldn't see what was
in the mirror, just the back of her head.

“What w^as she like?” she asked, distantly and dispassionately.

“Who?” I asked, and it was an honest question.

“In Chicago,” she said.

“She was just a little tart,” I said, “with fake Swedish hair on
her head and skates on her feet and practically nothing on in
between.”

“Was she pretty?” the distant and dispassionate voice asked.

“Hell,” I said, “if I met her on the street tomonow I wouldn't
recognize her.”

“Was she pretty?” the voice said.

“How do I know?” I demanded, peevish again. “The condition
she earned her living in you didn’t get around to noticing her face.”

“Was she pretty?”

“For Christ’s sake, forget it,” I said.

She turned around, and came toward me, holding her hands up
at about the level of the chin, one on each side, the fingers together
and slightly bent, not touching her face. She came up close to me
and stopped. “Forget it?” she repeated, as though she had just
heard my words.

Then she lifted her hands a little, and touched the white riddled
plaster-of Paris mask, touching it on each side, just barely prodding
the surface as though it were swollen and painful. “Look,” she
commanded.

She held it there for me to look at. “Look!” she commanded vin-
dictively, and jabbed her fingers into the flesh, hard. For it was
flesh, it wasn’t plaster of Paris at all.

“Yes, look,” she said, “and we lay up there in that God-forsaken
shack— both of us, my brother and me—we were kids— and it was
the smallpox— and my father was a drunk no-good— he was off
drunk, crying and drinking in a saloon if he could beg a dime—

152

cxjdng and telling how the kiddies, the sweet little angel kiddies,
was sick—oh, he was a drunk lousy warm-hearted kid-beating dying
Irishman-and my brother died— and he ought to have lived-it
wouldn’t ha\e mattered to him— not to a man— but me, I didn’t
die— I didn’t die, and I got well- and m) fatlier, he would look at
me and grab me and start kissing me all over the face, all over the
holes, slobbering and crying and stinking of whisky— or he’d look
at me and say, ‘Jeez,’ and slap me in the face— and it w^as all the
same— it was all die same, for I wasn’t the one that died— I didn’t
die—

It was all a breathless monotony, suddenly cut off. She had
groped out for me and had seized the cloth of my coat in her hands
and had stuck her bowed head up against my chest. So I stood
there with my right arm around her shoulder, patting her, patting
and making a kind of smoothing-out motion with my hand on
the back that shook soundlessly with what I took to be sobs.

Then, not lifting her head, she was saying, “It’s going to be like
that— it’s always been that way, and it’ll keep on— being like that—”

It, I thought, and thought she was talking about the face.

But she w^asn’t, for she was saying, “—it’ll keep on— they’ll kiss it
and slobber— then they’ll slap you in the face— no matter what you
do, do anything for them, make them what they are— take them out
of the gutter and make something out of them— and they’ll slap you
in the face— the first chance— because you had smallpox— they’ll see
some naked slut on skates and they’ll slap you in the face— they’ll
kick up dirt in your face—”

I kept on patting and making the smoothing-out motion, for
there w^asn’t anything else to do.

“—that’s the way it’ll be— always some slut on skates— some— ”

“Look here,” I said, still patting, “you make out. What do you
care what he does?”

She jerked hd" head up. “What do you know, what the hell do
you know?” she demanded, and dug her fingers into my coat and
shook me.

“If it’s all this grief,” I said, “let him go.”

“Let him go! Let him go! I’ll kill him first, I swear it,” she said,
glaring at me out of the now red eyes. “Let him go? Listen here—”
and she shook me again— “if he does run after some slut, he’ll come
back. He’s got to come back, do you hear? He’s got to. Because he
can’t do without me. And he knows it. He can do without any of
those sluts, but he can’t do without me. Not without Sadie Burke,
and he kno'ws it.”

And she lifted her face up, high, almost thrusting it at me, as

tliough she were showing me something I ought damned well to be
proud to look at.

“He’ll always come back/’ she asserted grimly.

And she was right. He always came back. The world was full of
sluts on skates, even if some of them weren’t on skates. Some of
them wore grass skirts and some of them pounded typewTiters and
some of them checked hats and some of them were married to
legislators, but he always came back. Not necessarily to be greeted
with open arms and a tender smile, however. Sometimes it was a
cold silence like the arctic night. Sometimes it was delirium for
every seismograph on the continent. Sometimes it was a single well-
chosen epithet. For instance, the time the Boss and I had to do a
little trip up to the north of the state. The afternoon we got back
we 'walked into the Capitol and there, in the stately lobby, under
the great bronze dome, was Sadie. We approached her. She waited
until w^e had arrived, then said, without preliminary, quite simply,
“You bastard.’’

“Gee, Sadie,” the Boss said, and grinned his grin of the wayward,
attractive boy, “you don’t even wait to find out anything.”

“You just can’t keep buttoned up, you bastard,” she said, still
simply, and walked away.

“Gee,” the Boss said ruefully to me, “I didn’t do a thing this
trip, and look what happens.”

What did Lucy Stark know? I don’t know. As far as you could
tell, she didn’t know anything. Even when she told the Boss she
was going to pack her bag, it was, so he said, because he hadn’t
thrown Byram B. White to the wolves.

But she didn’t pack the bag, even then.

She didn’t pack it because she 'was too honorable, or too gener-
ous, or too something, to hit him when she thought he was down.
Or about to go down. She wasn’t going to add the weight of her
thumb to what closely resembled a tidy package of disaster lying
on the scales with the blood seeping through the brown paper.
For the impeachment of Byram B. White had become a minor
issue. They had uncorked the real stuff: the impeachment of Willie
Stark.

I don’t know whether or not they had planned it that way. Or
whether they were forced into it b^^fore they planned when they
figured the Boss was turning on too much heat and it was their
only chance to get back on the offensive. Or whether they figured
that the Lord had delivered the enemy into their hands, that they
could get him dead to rights on the business of attempting to cor-
rupt, coerce, and blackmail the Legislature, in addition to the other

154

xxctle charges of malfeasance and nonfeasance. Maybe they had
some heroes lined up from among the ranks to testify that they
had had the heat put on them. It would have taken a hero, too
(or sound inducements), for nobody but a half-wit would have
belie\ed, in the light of the record, that the Boss was bluffing. But
apparently they figured they had found, or bought, some heroes.

Anyway, they tried it, and for a brief interval life was a blur for
speed. I gravely doubt that the Boss did any sleeping for two
•weeks. That is, bed sleeping. No doubt, he snatched something in
the back of automobiles roaring down highways at night, or m a
chair between the time one fellow went out the door and the next
came in. He roared across the state at eighty miles an hour, the
horn screaming, from town to town, crossroads to crossroads, five,
or six, or seven, or eight speakings in a day. He would come out on
the platform, almost slouching out, lounging out, as though all
the time in the world were before him and all the time were his.
He would begin, easy, “Folks, there's going to be a leetle mite of
trouble back in town. Between me and that Legislature-ful of
hyena-headed, feist-faced, belly-dragging sons of slack-gutted she-
wolves. If you know what I mean. Well, I been looking at them
and their kind so long, I just figured I'd take me a little trip and
see what human folks looked like in the face before I clean forgot.
Well, you all look human. More or less. And sensible. In spite of
what they're saying back in that Legislature and getting paid five
dollars a day of your tax money for saying it. They're saying you
didn't have bat sense or goose gumption when you cast your sacred
ballot to elect me Governor of this state. Maybe you didn't have
bat sense. Don't ask me, I’m prejudiced. But—" and now he
wouldn't be lounging with his head cocked a little on one side in
that easy sizing-up way, looking out from under the eyelids that
drooped a little, for now he'd thrust, all at once, the heavy head
forward, and the eyes, red from sleeplessness, would bulge— “I'll ask
you a question. And I want an answer. I want an answer before
God and under the awful hand of the Most High. Answer me:
Have I disappointed you? Have I?" Then, leaning sharply, he
would lift his right hand while the question w’^as still ringing in
the air, and say, "'StopI Don’t answer until you look into the depth
of your heart to see the truth. For there is where truth is. Not in
a book. Not in a lawyer's book. Not on any scrap of paper. In your
heart.” Then, in the long pause, he would swing his gaze slowly
over the crowd of faces. Then, “Answer me!"

I would wait for the roar. You can't help it. I knew it would
come, but I would wait for it, and every time it would seem intoier-

155

ably long before it came. It was like a deep dive. You start up to-
ward the light but you know you can*t breathe yet, not )et, and
ail you are aware of is the blood beating in your own head in the
intolerable timeiessness. Then the roar would come and I -would
feel the way you do w’hen you pop out of the w'ater from a deep
dive and the air bursts out of your lungs and everything reels in
the light. There is nothing like the roar of a crowd when it swells
up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing which is in
every man in the cro-vv^d but is not himself. The roar would swell
and rise and fall and swell again, with the Boss standing with his
right arm raised straight to Heaven and his red eyes bulging.

And when the roar fell away, he said, with his arm up, “I have
looked in your faces!''

And they would yell.

And he said, ‘*0 Lord, and I have seen a sign!"

And they would yell again.

And he said, ‘1 have seen dew on the fleece and the ground dry!"

Then the yell.

Then, have seen blood on the moon!" Then, “Buckets of
blood, and boy! I know whose blood it will be." Then, leaning
forward, grabbing out with his right hand as though to seize some-
thing in the air before him, “Gimme that meat ax!"

It was always that way, or like that. And charging across the
state with the horn screaming and blatting, and Sugar-Boy shaving
the gasoline truck on the highway and the spit flying from his
mouth while the lips -worked soundlessly and words piled up inside
him before he could get them out, “The b-b-b-bas-tudl" And the
Boss standing up on something with his arm against the sky (it
might be raining, it might be bright sun, it might be night and
the red light from sizzling gasoline flares set on the porch of a
country store), and the crowd yelling. And me so light-headed from
no sleep that my head felt big as the sky and when I walked I
seemed to be tiptoeing on clouds of cotton batting.

All of that.

But this too: the Boss sitting in the Cadillac, all lights ojff, in the
side street by a house, the time long past midnight. Or in the coun-
try, by a gate. The Boss leaning to a man, Sugar-Boy or one of
Sugar-Boy's pals. Heavy Harris or A1 Perkins, saying low and fast,
‘Tell him to come out. I know he's there. Tell him he better come
out and talk to me. If he won't come, just say you're a friend of
Ella Lou. That'll bring him." Or, “Ask him if he ever heard of
Slick Wilson/’ Or something of the kind. And then there would be

156

a man standing there with pajama tops stuck in pants, shivering,
his face white in the darkness.

And this: the Boss sitting in a room full of smoke, a pot of
coffee on the floor, or a bottle, saying, “Bring the bastard in. Bring
him in.”

And when they had brought the bastard in, the Boss would look
him over slow, from head to foot, and then he would say, “This
is your last chance.” He would say that slow and easy. Then he
would lean suddenly forward, at the man, and say, not slow and
easy now, “God damn you, do you know what I can do to you?”

And he could do it, too. For he had the goods.

On the afternoon of the fourth of April, 1933, the streets lead-
ing to the Capitol were full of people, and they weren't the kind
of people you usually saw on those streets. Not in those num-
bers, anyway. The Chronicle that night referred to the rumor of
a march on the Capitol, but affirmed that Justice would not be
intimidated. Before noon on the fifth of April there were a lot
more wool-hats and red-necks and Mother Hubbards and crepe-de-
Chine dresses with red-clay dust about the uneven bottom hem,
and a lot of clothes and faces which weren't cockJebur and cross-
roads, but county-seat and filling-station. The crowd moved up to-
ward the Capitol, not singing or yelling, and spread out over the
big lawn where the statues were.

Men with tripods and cameras were scurrying about on the edges
of the crowd, setting up their rigs on the Capitol steps, climbing
on the bases of the frock-coated statues to get shots. Here and there
around the edge of the crowd you could see the blue coat of a
mounted cop up above the crowd, and in the open space of lawn
between the crowd and the Capitol there were more cops, just
standing, and a few highway patrolmen, very slick and business-
like in their bright-green uniforms and black boots and black Sam
Browne belts and dangling holsters.

The crowd began chanting, “Willie, Willie, Willie— We want
Willie!”

I looked out of a window on the second floor and saw it. I won-
dered if the sound carried into the Chamber of Representatives,
where they were yammering and arguing and orating. Outside it
was very simple, out there on the lawn, under the bright spring
sky. No arguing. Very simple. *‘We want Willie— Willie, Willie,
Willie!” In a long rhythm, with a hoarse undertone, like surf.

Then I saw a big black car pull slowly into the drive before the
Capitol, and stop. A man got out, waved his hand to the cops, and

157

walked to tlie bandstand there on the edge ot the lawn. It was a
fat man. Tiny DuflF}'.

Then he was speaking to the crowd. I could not hear his words,
but I knew what he was saying. He w'as saying that IViliie Stark
asked them to go peaceably into the city, to wait until dark, to be
back on the lawn before the Capitol by eight o’clock, when he
would have something to teU them.

I knew what he wnuld tell them, I knew that he wnuld stand up
before them and say that he %vas still Governor of the state.

I knew that, because early the previous evening, around seven-
thirty, he had called me in and given me a big brown manila en-
velope. 'Towdan is down at the Haskell Hotel,” he said. “I know
he’s in his room now. Go dowm there and let him take a peep at
that but don’t let him get his hands on it and tell him to call his
dogs off. Not that it matters w^hether he does or not, for they’ve
changed their minds.” (Lowdan was the kingpin of the MacMurfee
boyi in the House.)

I had gone down to the Haskell and to Mr. Low^dan’s room with-
out sending my name. I knocked on the door, and when I heard
^he voice, said, '‘Message.” He opened the door, a big jovial-looking
man with a fine manner, in a flowered dressing gown. He didn’t
recognize me at first, just seeing a big brown envelope and some
sort of face above it. But I withdrew the brown envelope just as his
hand reached for it, anu stepped over the sill. Then he must have
looked at the face. “Why, howdy-do, Mr. Burden,” he said, “they
say you’ve been right busy lately.”

“Loafing,” I said, “just plain loafing. And I was just loafing by
and thought I’d stop and show you something a fellow gave me.”
I took the long sheet out of the envelope, and held it up for him
to look at, “No, don’t touch, burn-y, burn-y,” I said.

He didn’t touch but he looked, hard. I saw his Adam’s apple
jerk a couple of times; then he removed his cigar from his mouth
(a good cigar, two-bit at least, by the smell) and said, “Fake.”

“The signatures are supposed to be genuine,” I said, “but if you
aren’t sure you might ring up one of your boys whose name you
see on here and ask him man to man.”

He pondered that thought a moment, and the Adam’s apple
worked again, harder now, but he was taking it like a soldier. Or
he still thought it was a fake. Then he said, “I’ll call your bluff
on that,” and walked over to the telephone.

Waiting for his number, he looked up and said, “Have a seat^
won’t you?”

“No, thanks,” I said, for I didn’t regard the event as social.

158

Then he had the nurribez.

**Monty,” he said into the phone, **IVe got a statement here to
the effect that the undersigned hold that the impeachment proceed
ings are unjustified and will vote against them despite all pressure,
That’s what it says— ‘all pressure/ Your name’s on the list. How
about it?”

There was a long w^ait, then Mr. Lowdan said, “For God’s sake,
quit mumbling and blubbering and speak up!”

There was another wait, then Mr. Lowdan yelled, “You— you—”
But words failed him, and he slammed the telephone to the cradle,
and swung the big, recently jovial-looking face toward me. He was
making a gasping motion with his mouth, but no sound.

“Well,” I said, “you want to try another one?”

“It’s blackmail,” he said, very quietly, but huskily as though he
didn’t have the breath to spare. Then, seeming to get a little more
breath, “It’s blackmail. It’s coercion. Bribery, it’s bribery. I tell you,
you’ve blackmailed and bribed those men and I—”

“I don’t know why anybody signed this statement,” I said, “but
if what you charge should happen to be true then the moral strikes
me as this: MacMurfee ought not to elect legislators who can be
bribed or who have done things they can get blackmailed for.”

“MacMurfee—” he began, then fell into a deep silence, his
flowered bulk brooding over the telephone stand. He’d have his
own troubles with Mr. MacMurfee, no doubt.

“A small detail,” I said, “but it would probably be less em-
barrassing to you, and especially to the signers of this document,
if the impeachment proceedings were killed before coming to a
vote. You might try to see about getting that done by late tomor-
row. That should give you time to make your arrangements, and
to figure out as graceful a way as possible. Of course, it would be
more effective politically for the Governor to let the matter come
to a vote, but he was willing to let you do it the easy way, particu-
larly since there’s a good deal of unrest in the city about the mat-
ter.”

He wasn’t paying any attention to me, as far as I could tell. I
went to the door, opened it, and looked back. “Ultimately,” I said,
“it is immaterial to the Governor how you manage the matter.”

Then I closed the door and went down the hall.

That had been the night of the fourth of April. I was almost
sorry, the next day as I looked out the high window at the mass of
people filling the streets and the wide sweep of lawn beyond the
statues in front of the Capitol, that I knew what I knew. If I hadn’t
known, I could have stood there in the full excitement of the possi-

159

bilities of the moment. But I knew how the play would come out
This was like a dress rehearsal after tlie show has closed down. I
stood there and felt like God-Almighty brooding on History.

Which must be a dull business for God-Almighty, Who knows
how it is going to come out. Who knew, in fact, how it was going
to come out even before He knew there was going to be any His-
tory. Which is complete nonsense, for that involves Time and He
is out of Time, for God is Fullness of Being and in Him the End
is the Beginning. Which is what you can read in the little tracts
written and handed out on tlie street corners by the fat, grubby,
dandruff-sprinkled old man, with the metal-rimmed spectacles, who
used to be the Scholarly Attorney and who married the girl with
the gold braids and the clear, famished-looking cheeks, up in Arkan-
sas. But those tracts he wrote were crazy, I thought back then. I
thought God cannot be Fullness of Being. For Life is Motion.

(I use the capital letters as die old man did in the tracts. I had sat
aa'oss the table from him, with the foul unwashed dishes on one
end of it and the papers and books piled on the other end, in the
room over across the railroad tracks, and he had talked and I had
heard the capital letters in his voice. He had said, “God is Fullness
of Being.’' And I had said, “YouVe got the wrong end of the stick.
For Life is Motion. For—”

(For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete
Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life,
which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Be-
ing, we would worship Death, the Father. That was what I said to
the old man, who had looked at me across the papers and fouled
dishes, and his red-streaked eyes had blinked above tire metal-
rimmed spectacles, which had hung doTvn on the end of his nose.
He had shaken his head and a flake or two of dandruff had sifted
down from the sparse white hair ends which fringed the skull
within which the words had been taking shape from the electric
twitches in the tangled and spongy and blood-soaked darkness. He
had said then, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” And I had
said, “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.”

(For Life is a fire burning along a piece of string— or is it a fuse
to a powder keg which we call God?— and the string is what we
don’t know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, w^hich, if a gust of
wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History,
man’s Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up
ail the string, then man’s Knowledge will be equal to God’s Knowl-
edge and there won’t be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string
leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and

160

even the trail of ash will be blown completely away. So I had said
to tlie old man.

(But he had replied, “You think in Finite terms.” And I had said,
“Fm not thinking at all, I’m just drawing a picture.” He had said,
“Ha!” The way I remembered he had done a long time back when
he played chess with Judge Irwin in the long room in the white
house looking toward the sea. I had said, “I’ll draw you another
picture. It is a picture of a man trying to paint a picture of a sunset
But before he can dip his brush the color alwa)s changes and the
shape. Let us give a name to the picture which he is trying to paint:
Knowledge. Therefore if the object which a man looks at changes
constantly so that Knowledge of it is constantly untrue and is there-
fore Non-Knowledge, then Eternal Motion is possible. And Eternal
Life. Therefore we can believe in Eternal Life only if we deny God,
Who is Complete Knowledge.”

(The old man had said, “I will pray for your soul.”)

But even if I didn’t believe in the old man’s God, that morning
as I stood at the window of the Capitol and looked down on the
crowd, I felt like God, because I had the knowledge of what was to
come. I felt like God brooding on History, for as I stood there I
could see a little chunk of History right there in front. There were
the bronze statues on their pedestals, on the lawn, in frock coats,
with the lig t hand inserted under the coat, just over the heart, in
military unit. • ms with a hand on the sword hilt, even one in buck-
skin with the ight hand grasping the barrel of a grounded long
riSe. They were already History, and the grass around their pedes-
tals was shaved close and the flowers were planted in stars and
circles and crescents. Then over beyond the statues, there were the
people w'ho weren’t History yet. Not quite. But to me they looked
like History, because I knew the end of the event of which they
were a part. Or thought I knew the end.

I knew, too, how the newspapers would regard that crowd of peo-
ple, as soon as they knew the end of the event. They would regard
that crowd as cause. “A shameful display of cowardice on the part
of the Legislature . . . allow themselves to be intimidated by . . .
deplorable lack of leadership . . You could look at the crowd
out there and hear that undertone in its cry, hoarse like surf, and
think that the crowd there could cause the event. But no, it could
be said, Willie Stark caused the event by corrupting and blackmail-
ing the Legislature. But no, in turn it could be replied that Willie
Stark merely gave the Legislature the opportunity to behave in %he
way appropriate to its nature and that MacMurfee, who sponsored
the election of those men, thinking to use their fear and greed for

161

5s own. ends, was truly responsible. But no, to that it could be re-
plied that the responsibility belonged, after all, to tiiat crowd of
people, indirectly in so far as it had allowed MacMurfee to elect
such men, and directly in so far as it had, despite Maclvfurfee,
elected "IVhilie Stark. But why had they elected Willie Stark? Be-
cause of a complex of forces which had made them what they "were,
or because Willie Stark could lean toward them with bulging eyes
and right arm raised to Heaven?

One thing was certain: The sound of that chant hoarsely rising
and falling was to be the cause of nothing, nothing at all. I stood
in the window of the Capitol and hugged that knowledge like a
precious and thorny secret, and did not think anything.

I watched the fat man get out of the black limousine and mount
the bandstand, I saw the crowd shift and curdle and thin and dis-
solve. I looked across beyond the now lonely and occupationless
policemen, beyond the statues—frock coats, uniforms, buckskin— to
the great lawn, which was empty and bright in the spring sunshine.
I spewed out the last smoke from my cigarette and flicked the butt
out the open window and watched it spin over and over to the
stone steps far below.

Willie Stark was to stand on those steps at eight o’clock that
night, in a flood of light, looking small at the top of the great steps
with the mountainous heave of the building behind him.

That night the people pressed up to the very steps, hlling all the
shadow beyond the sharply defined area of light. (Lighting appara-
tus had been mounted on the pedestals of two of the statues, one
buckskin, one frock coat.) They called and chanted, “Willie— Willie
—Willie,” pressing at the cordon of police at the foot of the steps.
Then, after a while, out of the tall doorway of the Capitol, he ap-
peai'ed. Then, as he stood there, blinking in the light, the words of
the chant disappeared, and there was a moment of stillness, and
then there was only the roar. It seemed a long time before he lifted
his hand to stop it. Then the roar seemed to die away, slowly, un-
der the downward pressure of his hand.

I stood down in the crowd with Adam Stanton and Anne Stanton
and watched him come out on the steps of the Capitol. When it
was over— when he had said what he had to say to the crowd and
had gone back inside leaving tlie new, unchecked roar of voices
behind him— I told Anne and Adam good night and went to meet
the Boss.

I rode with him back to the Mansion. He hadn’t said a word
when I joined him at the car. Sugar-Boy worked through the back

162

streets, while behind us we could still hear the roaring and shouting
and the protracted blatting of automobile horns. Then Sugar-Boy
shook himself free into a quiet little street where the houses sat
back from the pavement, lights on inside them now and people in
the lighted rooms, and where the budding boughs interlaced above
us. At the corners where the street lamps were you could catch the
hint of actual green on the boughs.

Sugar-Boy drove up to the rear entrance of the Mansion. The
Boss got out and went into the door. I followed him. He walked
down the back hall, where we met nobody, and then into the big
hall. He paced right across the hall, under the chandeliers and mir-
rors, past the sweep of the stairway, looked into the drawing room,
crossed the hall again to look into the back sitting room, then again
to look into the library. I caught on, and quit following him. I just
stood in the middle of the big hall and waited. He hadn’t said he
wanted me, but he hadn't said he didn't. In fact, he hadn't said any-
thing. Not a word.

When he turned from the library into the hall again, a white-
coated Negro boy came out of the dining room. “Boy," the Boss
asked, “you seen Mrs. Stark?"

“Yassuh."

“Where, dammit?" the Boss snapped. “You think I'm asking for
my health?"

“Naw, suh, I didn't think nuthin, I—"

“Where?" the Boss demanded in a tone to set the chandelier tin-
gling.

After the first paralysis, the lips began to work in the black face.
In the beginning without effect. Then a sound was detectable. “Up-
stairs—she done gone upstairs— I reckin she done gone to bed—
she—"

The Boss had headed up the stairs.

He came back almost immediately, walked past me without a
word, and back to the library. I trailed along. He flung himself
down on the big leather couch, heaved his feet off the floor to the
leather, and said, “Shut the God-damned door."

I shut the door, and he leaned back on the cushions, at about
a thirty-degree angle from horizontal, and glumly studied his
knuckles. “You would have thought she might wait up for me to-
night," he said finally, still studying the knuckles. Then, looking at
me, “She's gone to bed. Gone to bed and locked her door. Said she
had a headache. I go upstairs and there is Tom sitting in the room
across from her room doing his schoolwork* Before I lay hand to
the knob of her door, he comes out and says, *She don't want to be

163

bothered/ Like I was a delivery boy. *I’m not going to bother her,*
I said to him, ‘I*m just going to tell her what happened.’ He looked
at me and said, 'She’s got a headache, and she don’t want to be
bothered.’ ” He hesitated, looked at the knuckles again, then back
to me, and said with a hint o£ defensiveness in his tone, “All I was
going to do was tell her how it came out tonight.’^

“She wanted }OU to throw Byram to the wolves,” I said. “Did she
■want you to throw yourself to the wolves?”

“I don’t know what the hell she wants,” he said. “I don’t know
what the hell any of ’em want. A man can’t tell. But you can tell
this, if any man tried to run things the way they want him to half
the time, he’d end up sleeping on the bare ground. And how would
she like that?”

“I imagine Lucy could take it,” I said.

“Lucy—” he said, and looked sort of surprised, as though I had
introduced a new topic of conversation. Then I recollected that
Lucy’s name hadn’t been mentioned. Sure, he had been talking
about Lucy Stark, he knew that and I knew that. But as soon as the
name Lucy was mentioned, to take the place of that she, somehow
it was different. It was as though she had walked into the room,
and looked at us.

“Lucy—” he repeated. Then, “All right— Lucy. She could take it.
Luc)^ could sleep on the bare ground and eat red beans, but it
■cvouldn’t change the world a damned bit. But can Lucy understand
that? No, Lucy cannot.” He was, apparently, taking a relish in
using the name now, in saying Lucy instead of she^ as though he
proved something about something, or about her, or about himself,
by saying it, by being able to say it. “Lucy,” he was saying, “she
could sleep on the bare ground. And that’s exactly what she’s going
to raise Tom to do, too, if she has her way. She’d have him so the
six-year kids will be plugging him with nigger-shooters, and then
not bothering to run. He’s a good stout boy— plays a good game of
football, bet he makes the team when he gets to college— but she’s
going to ruin him. Make him a sissy. Looks like I say a word to the
boy and you can just see her face freeze. I called up here tonight to
get Tom to come down and see the crowd. Was going to send Sugar-
Boy to get him because I wasn’t going to have time to get home.
But would she let him go? No, sir. Said he had to stay home and
study. Study,” he said. Then, “Didn’t want him down there, that
was it. Me and the crowd.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “That’s the way all women treat their kids.
Besides, you got to be a big-shot by hitting your books.”

“He"s smart, smart enough without being a sissy,” he said. “He

164

makes good grades in school, and, by God, he better. Sure, I want
him to study. And he better, but what 1 don't get is—"

There was a racket out in the hall, voices, then a knock at the
door.

“See who it is," the Boss said.

I opened the door and in stormed the familiar faces, somewdiat
flushed. Tiny Duffy's in the lead. They ringed round the Boss and
wheezed and shoved and chortled. “We fixed 'em!— We damned
well fixed 'em!— You're telling it, we stopped that clock!— It'll be a
long time till next time!" While the Boss lay back on the cushions
at his thirty-degree angle, with his feet propped on the leather, and
his eyes flickering around from face to face, under the half-lowered
lids, you got the notion he was spying through a peephole. He
hadn't said a word.

“Champagne," one of the boys was saying, “real champagne! A
case and it is honest-to-God stuff. French, from France. Out in tlie
kitchen, and Sambo is icing up. Boss, it's a celebration!"

The Boss didn't say anything.

“Celebrate, it's a celebration, ain't you gonna celebrate. Boss?"

“Duffy," the Boss said, not loud, “if you aren't too drunk you can
see I don't want this assing around in here. Take your rabble over
to the other side of the house and stay out from under foot." Then
in the silence of his pause his eyes flickered over the faces again, to
come back to Duffy. To whom he said, “You think you grasp the
idea?"

Tiny Duffy did grasp the idea. But the others grasped it, too, and
I thought that I detected a slight competition among the brothers
of the lodge to be among the first out.

The Boss regarded the fine paneling of the closed door for a
couple of minutes. Then he said, “You know what Lincoln said?"

“What?" I asked.

“He said a house divided against itself cannot stand. Well, he
was wrong."

“Yeah?"

“Yeah," the Boss said, “for this government is sure half slave and
half son-of-a-bitch, and it is standing."

“Which is which?" I asked.

“Slaves down at the Legislature, and the sons-of-bitches up here,"
he said. And added, “Only sometimes they overlap.”

But Lucy Stark did not leave the Boss after the settlement of the
impeachment trouble. Nor even after the next election, when the
Boss came in for a second term in 1934. (A Governor can succeed

165

himself in our state, and the Boss succeeded himself with a venge-
ance. There never had been a vote like it.) I suppose Tom was the
reason she hung on, WTien she did leave him, there wasn't any
noise. Health. She went to Florida for a long pull. WTien she got
back, she stayed out of town at a little place her sister had, a poul-
try farm and hatchery just out of town. Tom used to spend a lot
of his time out with her, but I imagined that by that time she
figured he wasn't Mamma's Boy any more. By that time he was a
strapping fellow, cocky and fast on his feet, a natural-born quarter-
back, and he had discovered that something besides pasteurized
milk came in bottles and that approximately half the human race
belonged to a sex interestingly different from his own. Lucy prob-
ably figured that she could do something to hold Tom down, and
so there wasn't any absolute break with Willie. Now and then, but
not often, she would appear in public with him. For instance, on
that trip up to Mason City— the time the Boss and I made the mid-
night visit on Judge Irwin— Lucy came along. That was in 1936,
and by that time Lucy had been staying out at her sister’s poultry
farm for going on a year.

The Boss himself used to go out to the poultry farm occasionally,
to keep up appearances. Two or three times the papers— the ad-
ministration papers, that is— ran photographs of him standing with
his wife and kid in front of a hen yard or incubator house. The
hens didn't do any harm, either. They gave a nice, homey atmos-
phere. They inspired confidence.

Chapter Four

THAT night when the Boss and I called on Judge Irwin in thx.
middle of the night and when, burning the road back to Mason
City in the dark, die car hurtled between the black fields, he said to
me, “There is always something/'

And I said, “Maybe not on the Judge/'

And he said, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption
and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the
shroud. There is always something.”

And he told me to dig it out, dig it up, the dead cat with patches
of fur still clinging to the tight, swollen, dove-gray hide. It was the
proper job for me, for, as I have said, I was once a student of his-
tory. A student of history does not care what he digs out of the ash
pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human
past. He doesn't care whether it is the dead pussy or the Kohinoor
diamond. So it was a proper assignment for me, an excursion into
the past.

It was to be my second excursion into the past, more interesting
and sensational than the first, and much more successful. In fact,
this second excursion into the past was to be perfectly successful*
But the first one had not been successful. It had not been success-
ful because in the midst of the process I tried to discover the truth
and not the facts. Then, when the truth was not to be discovered,
or discovered could not be understood by me, I could not bear to
live with the cold-eyed reproach of the facts. So I walked out of a
room, the room where the facts lived in a big box of three-by-five-
xnch note cards, and kept on walking until I walked into my second
job of historical research, the job which should be known as the
“Case of the Upright Judge,”

But I must tell about the first excursion into the enchantments of
the past. Not that the first excursion has anything directly to do
with the story of Willie Stark, but it Uas a great deal to do with the

167

story of Jack Burden, and the story of Willie Stark and the story of
Jack Burden are, in one sense, one stor).

Long ago Jack Burden was a graduate student, working for his
Ph.D. in American History, in die State University of his native
state. This Jack Burden (of whom the present Jack Burden, Me, is
a legal, biological, and perhaps even metaphysical continuator)
lived in a slatternly apartment with two other graduate students,
one industrious, stupid, unlucky, and alcoholic and the other idle,
intelligent, lucky, and alcoholic. At least, they were alcoholic for a
period after the first of the month, when they received the miser-
able check paid them by the University for their miserable work as
assistant teachers. The industry and ill luck of one canceled out
against the idleness and luck of the other and they both amounted
to the same thing, and they drank what they could get when they
could get it. They drank because they didn’t really have the
slightest interest in wdiat they were doing now, and didn’t have the
slightest hope for the future. 1‘hey could not even bear the thought
of pushing on to finish their degrees, for that would mean leaving
the University (leaving the first-of-the-month drunks, the yammer
about ‘Vork” and the '‘ideas” in smoke-blind rooms, the girls who
staggered slightly and giggled indiscreetly on the dark stairs leading
to the apartment) to go to some normal school on a sun-baked
crossroads or a junior college long on Jesus and short on funds, to
go to face the stark reality of drudgery and dry rot and prying eyes
and the slow withering of the green wisp of dream which had, like
some window plant in an invalid’s room, grown out of a bottle.
Only the bottle hadn’t had water in it. It had had something which
looked like water, smelled like kerosene, and tasted like carbolic
acid: one-run corn whisky.

Jack Burden lived with them, in the slatternly apartment among
the unwashed dishes in the sink and on the table, the odor of stale
tobacco smoke, the dirty shirts and underwear piled in corners. He
even took a relish in the squalor, in the privilege of letting a last
crust of buttered toast fall to the floor to be undisturbed until the
random heel should grind it into the mud-colored carpet, in the
spectacle of the fat roach moving across the cracked linoleum of the
bathroom floor while he steamed in the tub. Once he had brought
his mother to the apartment for tea, and she had sat on the edge of
tlie overstuffed chair, holding a cracked cup and talking with a
brittle and calculated charm out of a face which was obviously
being held in shape by a profound exercise of will. She saw a roach
venture out from the kitchen door. She saw one of Jack Burden’s
friends crush an ant on the inner lip of the sugar bowl and flick

168

the carcass from his finger. The nail of the finger itself was not
\ery clean. But she kept right on delivering the chaiTO; out of the
rigid face. He had to say that for her.

But afterward, as they walked do\m the street, she had said,
'‘Wliy do you live like tiiat?”

‘It’s what I’m built for, I reckon,” Jack Burden said.

“With those people,” she said.

“They’re all right,” he said, and wondered if they were, and
wondered if he was.

His mother didn’t say anything for a minute, making a sharp,
bright clicking on the pavement wdth her heels as she w^aiked along,
holding her small shoulders trimly back, carrying her famished-
cheeked, blue-eyed, absolutely innocent face slightly lifted to the
pulsing sunset world of April like a very expensive present the
world ought to be glad even to have a look at.

Walking along beside him, she said meditatively, '‘That dark-
haired one— if he’d get cleaned up— he w^ouldn’t be bad looking/’

“That’s what a lot of other women think,” Jack Burden said, and
suddenly felt a nauseated hatred of the dark-haired one, the one
who had killed the ant on the sugar bowl, who had the dirty naik.
But he had to go on, something in him made him go on, “Yes, and
a lot of them don’t even care about cleaning him up. They’ll take
him like he is. He’s the great lover of the apartment. He put the
sag in the springs of that divan we got,”

“Don’t be vulgar,” she said, because she definitely did not like
what is known as vulgarity in conversation.

“It’s the truth,” he said.

She didn’t answer, and her heels did the bright clicking. Then
she said, “If he’d throw those awful clothes away— and get some-
thing decent.”

“Yeah,” Jack Burden said, “on his seventy-five dollars a month.”

She looked at him now, down at his clothes. “Yours are pretty
awful, too,” she said.

“Are they?” Jack Burden demanded,

“I’ll send you money for some decent clothes,” she said.

A few days later the check came and a note telling him to get a
“couple of decent suits and accessories.” The check was for two
hundred and fifty dollars. He did not even buy a necktie. But he
and the two other men in the apartment had a Tvonderfui blowout,
which lasted for five days, and as a result of which the industrious
and unlucky one lost his job and the idle and lucky one got too
sociable, and, despite his luck, contracted a social disease. But noth-
ing happened to Jack Burden, for nothing ever happened to Jack

169

isurden, who was in\ ulnerable. Perhaps that was the curse of Jack
Burden: he was invulnerable.

So Jack Burden li\ed in the slatternly apartment with the two
other graduate students, for even after being fired the unlucky, in-
dustrious one still lived in the apartment. He simply stopped pay-
ing anything but he stayed. He borrowed money for cigarettes. He
sullenly ate the food the others brought in and cooked. He lay
around during the day, for there was lo reason to be industrious
any more, ever again. Once at night Jack Burden w^oke up and
thought he heard the sound of sobs fr m the living room, where the
unlucky, industrious one slept on a 'v^all bed. Then one day the un-
lucky, industrious one was not there. They never did know where
he had gone, and they never heard from him again.

But before that they lived in the apartment, in an atmosphere of
brotherhood and mutual understanding. They had this in com-
mon: they were all hiding. The difference ■was in what they were
hiding from. The two others were hiding from the future, from the
day when they w^ould get degrees and leave the University. Jack
Burden, however, was hiding from the present. The other t-wo took
refuge in the present. Jack Burden took refuge in the past. The
other two sat in the living room and argued and drank or played
cards or read, but Jack Burden was sitting, as like as not, back in
his bedroom before a little pine table, with the notes and papers
and books before him, scarcely hearing the voices. He might come
out and take a drink or take a hand of cards or argue or do any of
the other things they did, but what was real was back in that bed-
room on the pine table.

What was back in the bedroom on the pine table?

A large packet of letters, eight tattered, black-bound account
books tied together with faded red tape, a photogi'aph, about five
by eight inches, m Dunted on cardboard and stained in its lower half
by water, and a plain gold ring, man-sized, wuth some engraving in
it, on a loop of string. The past. Or that part of the past which had
gone by the name of Cass Mastern.

Cass Mastem was one of the two maternal uncles of Ellis Burden,
the Scholarly Attorney, a brother of his mother, Lavinia Mastem.
The other uncle was named Gilbert Mastern, who died in 1914, at
the age of ninety-four or -five, rich, a builder of railroads, a sitter on
boards of directors, and left the packet of letters, the black account
books, and the photograph, and a great deal of money to a grand-
son (and not a penny to Jack Burden). Some ten years later the heir
of Gilbert Mastern, recollecting tliat Jack Burden, with whom he
had no personal acquaintance, was a student of history, or some-

170

thing of the sort, sent him the packet of letters, the account books,
and the photograph, asking if he, Jack Burden, thought that the
enclosures were of any ‘‘financial interest’* since he, the heir, had
heard that libraries sometimes would pay a “fair sum for old papers
and antebellum relics and keepsakes.” Jack Burden replied that
since Cass Mastern had been of no historical importance as an in-
dividual, it was doubtful that any library would pay more than a
few dollars, if anything, for the material, and asked for insti'uctions
as to the disposition of the parcel. The heir replied that under the
circumstances Jack Burden might keep the things for “sentimental
reasons.”

So Jack Burden made the acquaintance of Cass Mastern, who had
died in 1864 at a military hospital in Atlanta, who had been only
a heard but forgotten name to him, and who was the pair of dark,
wide-set, deep eyes which burned out of the photograph, through
the dinginess and dust and across more than fifty years. The eyes,
which were Cass Mastern, stared out of a long, bony face, but a
young face with full lips above a rather thin, curly black beard*
The lips did not seem to belong to that bony face and the burning
eyes.

The young man in the picture, standing, visible from the thighf
up, wore a loose-fitting, shapeless jacket, too large in the collar,
short in the sleeves to show strong wrists and bony hands clasped
at the waist. The thick dark hair, combed sweepingly back from the
high brow, came down long and square-cut, after the fashion of
time, place, and class, almost to brush the collar of the coarse, hand-
me-down-looking jacket, which was the jacket of an infantryman
in the Confederate Army.

But everything in the picture in contrast with the dark, burning
eyes, seemed accidental. That jacket, however, was not accidental.
It was worn as the result of calculation and anguish, in pride and
self-humiliation, in the conviction that it -would be worn in death.
But the death was not to be tliat quick and easy. It w^as to come
slow and hard, in a stinking hospital in Atlanta. The last letter in
the packet was not in Cass Mastern’s hand. Lying in the hospital
with his rotting wound, he dictated his farewell letter to his
brother, Gilbert Mastern. The letter, and the last of the account
books in which Cass Mastern’s journal was kept, were eventually
sent back home to Mississippi, and Cass Mastern was buried some-
where in Atlanta, nobody had ever known where.

It was, in a sense, proper that Cass Mastern— in the gray jacket^
sweat-stiffened, and prickly like a hair shirt, which it was for him at
the same time that it was the insignia of a begrudged glory-should

171

have gone back to Georgia to rot slowly to death. For he had been
born in Georgia, he and Gilbert Mastem and Lavinia Mastern, in
the red hills up tow’ard Tennessee. “I was born,'* the first page of
the first volume of the journal said, '*in a log cabin in north
Georgia, in circumstances of poverty, and if in later years I have
lain soft and have supped from silver, may the Lord not let die in
my heart the knowledge of frost and of coarse diet. For all men
come naked into the world, and in prosperity ‘man is prone to evil
as the sparks fiy upward.' " The lines were written when Cass was
a student at Transylvania College, up in Kentucky, after what he
called his “darkness and trouble'' had given place to the peace of
God. For the journal began with an account of the “darkness and
turouble"— which w^as a perfectly real trouble, with a dead man and
a live woman and long nail scratches down Cass Mastern's bony
face.“I "WTite this down," he said in the journal, “with what truth-
fulness a sinner may attain unto, that if ever pride is in me, of flesh
or spirit, I can peruse these pages and know with shame what evil
has been in me, and may be in me, for who knows what breeze may
blow upon the charred log and fan up flame again?"

The impulse to write the journal sprang from the “darkness and
trouble," but Cass Mastern apparently had a systematic mind, and
so he -went back to the beginning, to the log cabin in the red hills
of Georgia. It was the older brother, Gilbert, some fifteen year?
older than Cass, who lifted the family from the log cabin. Gilbert,
who had run away from home when a boy and gone west to Missis-
sippi, was well on the way to being “a cotton snob” by the time he
was in his thirties, that is, by 1850. The penniless and no doubt
hungry boy walking barefoot onto the black soil of Mississippi
was to become, ten or twelve years later, the master sitting the
spirited roan stallion (its name was Powhatan— that from the
journal) in front of the white veranda. How did Gilbert make his
first dollar? Did he cut the throat of a traveler in the canebrake?
Did he black boots an an inn? It is not recorded. But he made his
fortune, and sat on the white veranda and voted Whig. After the
war when the white veranda was a pile of ashes and the fortune was
gone, it was not surprising that Gilbert, who had made one fortune
with his bare hands, out of the very air, could now, with all his ex-
perience and cunning and hardness (the hardness harder now for
the four years of riding and short rations and disappointment),
snatch another one, much greater than the first. If in later years he
ever remembered his brother Cass and took out the last letter, the
one dictated in the hospital in Atlanta, he must have mused over
it with a tolerant irony. For it said: “Remember me, but without

172

grief. If one of us is lucky, it is I. I shall have rest and I hope in the
mercy of the Everlasting and in His blessed election. But }ou, my
dear brother, are condemned to eat bread in bitterness and build
on the place where the charred embers and ashes are and to make
bricks without straw and to suffer in tlie ruin and guilt of our dear
Land and in the common guilt of man. In the next bed to me there
is a young man from Ohio. He is dying. His moans and curses and
prayers are not different from any others to be heard in this taber-
nacle of pain. He marched hither in his guilt as I in mine. And in
the guilt of his Land. May a common Salvation lift us both from
the dust. And, dear brother, I pray God to give you strength for
w^hat is to come.’’ Gilbert must have smiled, looking back, for he
had eaten little bread in bitterness. He had had his own kind of
strength. By 1870 he was again well off. By 1875 or ’76 he was rich.
By 1880 he had a fortune, was living in New York, was a name, a
thick, burly man, slow of movement, with a head like a block of
bare granite. He had lived out of one world into another. Perhaps
he was even more at home in the new than in the old. Or perhaps
the Gilbert Masterns are always at home in any world. As the Cass
Masterns are never at home in any wwld.

But to return: Jack Burden came into possession of the papers
from the grandson of Gilbert Mastern. When the time came for him
to select a subject for his dissertation for his Ph.D., his professor
suggested that he edit the journal and letters of Cass Mastern, and
write a biographical essay, a social study based on those and other
materials. So Jack Burden began his first journey into the past

It seemed easy at first. It was easy to reconstruct the life of the
log cabin in the red hills. There were the first letters back from
Gilbert after he had begun his rise (Jack Burden managed to get
possession of the other Gilbert Mastern papers of the period before
the Civil War). There w^as the known pattern of that life, gradually
altered toward comfort as Gilbert’s affluence w^as felt at tliat dis-
tance. Then, in one season, the mother and father died, and Gilbert
returned to burst, no doubt, upon Cass and Lavinia as an unbe-
lieveable vision, a splendid impostor in black broadcloth, varnished
boots, white linen, heavy gold ring. He put Lavinia in a school in
Atlanta, bought her trunks of dresses, and kissed her good-bye.
("Could you not have taken me "with you, dear Brother Giibeit? I
would have been ever so dutiful and affectionate a sister," so she
wrote to him in the copybook hand, in brown ink, in a language
not her own, a language of schoolroom propriety. "May I not come
to you now? Is there no little task which I—" But Gilbert had other
plans* When the time came for her to appear in his house she would

173

be ready.) But he took Cass with him, a hobbledehoy now wearing
black and mounted on a blooded mare.

At the end of three years Cass was not a hobbledehoy. He had
spent three years of monastic rigor at Valhalla, Gilbert’s house, un-
der the tuition of a IVIr. Lawson and of Gilbert himself. From Gil-
bert he learned the routine of plantation management. From Mr.
Law’son, a tubercular and vague young man from Princeton, New
Jersey, he learned some geometrv, some Latin, and a great deal of
Presbyterian theolog}'. He liked the books, and once Gilbert (so the
journal said) stood in the doorway and watched him bent over the
table and then said, “At least you may be good for that/'

But he w^as good for more than that. When Gilbert gave him a
small plantation, he managed it for two years with such astuteness
(and such luck, for both season and market conspired in his behalf)
that at the end of the time he could repay Gilbert a substantial
part of the purchase price. Then he went, or w^as sent, to Transyl-
vania. It was Gilbert’s idea. He came into the house on Cass’s plan-
tation one night to find Cass at his books. He walked across the
room to the table w^here the books lay, by which Cass now stood.
Gilbert stretched out his arm and tapped the open book with his
riding crop. “You might make something out of that,” he said. The
journal reported that, but it did not report what book it was that
Gilbert’s riding crop tapped. It is not important what book it was.
Or perhaps it is important, for something in our mind, in our im-
agination, wants to know that fact. We see the red, square, strong
hand (“my brother is strong-made and florid”) protruding from the
white cuff, grasping the crop which in that grasp looks fragile like
a twig. We see the flick of the little leather loop on the open page,
a flick brisk, not quite contemptuous, but we cannot make out the
page.

In any case, it probably was not a book on theology, for it seems
doubtful that Gilbert, in such a case, would have used the phrase
“make something out of that.” It might have been a page of the
Latin poets, however, for Gilbert would have discovered that, in
small doses, they went well with politics or the law. So Transyl-
vania College it was to be— suggested, it developed, by Gilbert’s
neighbor and friend, Mr. Davis, Mr. Jefferson Davis, who had once
been a student there. Mr. Davis had studied Greek.

At Transylvania, in Lexington, Cass discovered pleasure. “I dis-
covered that there is an education for vice as well as for virtue, and
1 learned what was to be learned from the gaming table, the bottle,
and the racecourse and from the illicit sweetness of the flesh.” He

174

had come out of the poverty of the cabin and the monastic regime
of Valhalla and the responsibilities of his own little plantation;
and he was tall and strong, and, to judge from the photograph, vmcII
favored, with the burning dark eyes. It was no wonder that he ''dis-
covered pleasure*’— or that pleasure discovered him. For, though the
journal does not say so, in the events leading up to the "darkness
and trouble,” Cass seems to have been, in the beginning at least,
the pursued rather than the pursuer.

The pursuer is referred to in the journal as "she” and "her.” But
Jack Burden learned the name. “She” Tvas Annabelle Trice, Mrs*
Duncan Trice, and Mr. Duncan Trice was a prosperous young
banker of Lexington, Kentucky, who was an Intimate of Cass Mas-
tern and apparently one of those who led him into the paths of
pleasure. Jack Burden learned the name by going back to the files
of the Lexington newspapers for the middle 1850’s to locate the
story of a death. It was the death of Mr. Duncan Trice. In the news-
paper it was reported as an accident. Duncan Trice had shot him-
self by accident, the newspaper said, while cleaning a pair of pistols.
One of the pistols, already cleaned, lay on the couch where he had
been sitting, in his library, at the time of the accident. The other,
the lethal instrument, had fallen to the floor. Jack Burden had
known, from the journal, the nature of the case, and so when he
had located the special circumstances, he had learned the identity
of "she.” Mr. Trice, the newspaper said, was survived by his widow,
nee Annabelle Puckett, of Washington, D.C.

Shortly after Cass had come to Lexington, Annabelle Trice met
him. Duncan Trice brought him home, for he had received a letter
from Mr. Davis, recommending the brother of his good friend and
neighbor, Mr. Gilbert Mastern. (Duncan Trice had come to Lexing-
ton from southern Kentucky, where his own father had been a
friend of Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson, when Samuel lived
at Fairview and bred racers.) So Duncan Trice brought the tall boy
home, who was no longer a hobbledehoy, and set him on a sofa and
thrust a glass into his hand and called in his pretty, husky-voiced
wife, of whom he was so proud, to greet the stranger. "When she
first entered the room, in which the shades of approaching twilight
were gathering though the hour for the candles to be lit had
scarcely come, I thought that her eyes were black, and the effect was
most striking, her hair being of such a fairness. I noticed, too, how
softly she trod and with a gliding motion which, though she was
perhaps of a little less than moderate stature, gave an impression of
regal dignity—

175

€t aver tens rosea cervice refiilsit
Ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem
Spiravere, pedes vestis defluxit ad imos,

Et vera incessu patuit Dea,

So the Mantuan said, when Venus appeared and the true goddess
was revealed by her gait. She came into the room and was the true
goddess as revealed in her movement, and was, but for Divine Grace
(if such be gi'anted to a parcel of corruption such as I), my true
damnation. She gave me her hand and spoke with a tingling huski-
ness which made me think of rubbing my hand upon a soft deep-
piled cloth, like velvet, or upon a fur. It would not have been called
a musical voice such as is generally admired. I know that, but I can
only set down what effect it worked upon my own organs of hear-
ing.

Cass set down a very conscientious description of every feature
and proportion, a kind of tortured inventory, as though in the
midst of the “darkness and trouble,” at the very moment of his
agony and repudiation, he had to take one last backward look even
at the risk of being turned into the pillar of salt. “Her face was not
large though a little given to fullness. Her mouth was strong but
the lips were red and moist and seemed to be slightly parted or
about to part themselves. The chin was short and firmly moulded.
Her skin was of a great whiteness, it seemed then before the candles
were lit, bur afterwards I was to see that it had a bloom of color
upon it. Her hair, which was in a remarkable abundance and of
great fairness, was drawn back from her face and worn in large
coils low down to the neck. Her waist was very small and her
breasts, which seemed naturally high and round and full, were the
higher for the corsetting. Her dress, of a dark blue silk I remember,
was cut low to the very downward curve of the shoulders, and in
the front showed how the breasts were lifted like twin orbs.”

Cass described her that way. He admitted that her face was not
beautiful. “Though agreeable in its proportions,” he added. But
the hair was beautiful, and “of an astonishing softness, upon your
hand softer and finer than your thought of silk.” So even in that
moment, in the midst of the “darkness and trouble,” the recollec-
tion intrudes into the journal of how that abundant, fair hair had
slipped across his fingers. “But,” he added, “her beauty was her
eyes.”

He had remarked how, when she first came in, into the shadowy
room, her eyes had seemed black. But he had been mistaken, he
was to discover, and that discovery was the first step toward his un-

176

doing. After the greeting (“she gi^eeted me with great simplicity and
courtesy and bade me again take my seat’’), she remarked on how
dark the room was and how the autumn always came to take one
unawares. Then she touched a bellpull and a Negro boy entered,
‘‘She commanded him to bring light and to mend the fire, which
was sunk to ash, or near so. He came back presently with a seven-
branclied candlestick which he put upon the table back of the
couch on which I sat. He struck a lucifer but she said, ‘Let me light
the candles.’ I remember it as if it were only yesterday when I sat on
diat couch. I had turned my head idly to watch her light the can-
dles. The little table was between us. She leaned over the candles
and applied the lucifer to the wicks, one after another. She was lean-
ing over, and I saw how the corset lifted her breasts together, but
because she was leaning the eyelids shaded her ejes from my sight.
Then she raised her head a little and looked straight at me over the
new candle flames, and I saw all at once that her eyes were not black.
They were blue, but a blue so deep that I can only compare it to
the color of tire night sky in autumn w^hen the weather is clear and
there is no moon and the stars have just well come out. And I had
not known how large they were. I remember saying that to myself
with perfect clearness, ‘I had not known how large they were/
several times, slowly, like a man marvelling. Then I knew that I was
blushing and I felt my tongue dry like ashes in my mouth and I
was in the manly state.

“I can see perfectly clearly the expression on her face even now,
but I cannot interpret it. Sometimes I have thought of it as having
a smiling hidden in it, but I cannot be sure. (I am only sure of this:
that man is never safe and damnation is ever at hand, O God and
my Redeemerl) I sat there, one hand clenched upon my knee and
the other holding an empty glass, and I felt that I could not
breathe. Then she said to her husband, who stood in the room be-
hind me, ‘Duncan, do you see that Mr. Mastern is in need of re-
freshment?’ ”

The year passed. Cass, who was a good deal younger than Duncan
Trice, and as a matter of fact several years younger than Annabelle
Trice, became a close companion of Duncan Trice and learned
much from him, for Duncan Trice was rich, fashionable, clever, and
high-spirited (“much given to laughter and fuihblooded”). Duncan
Trice led Cass to the bottle, the gaming table and the racecourse,
but not to the “illicit sweetness of the flesh.” Duncan Trice was
passionately and single-mindedly devoted to his wdfe. (“When she
came into a room, his eyes would fix upon her without shame, and
I have seen her avert her face and blush for the boldness of his

177

glance when company was present. But I think that it was done by
him unawares, his partiality for her was so great.”) No, the other
young men, members of the Trice circle, led Cass first to the “illicit
sweetness,” But despite the new interests and gratifications, Cass
could work at his books. There w^as even time for that, for he had
great strength and endurance.

So the year passed. He had been much in the Trice house, but
no word beyond the “words of merriment and civility” had passed
between him and Annabelle Trice. In June, there was a dancing
party at the house of some friend of Duncan Trice. Duncan Trice,
his wife, and Cass happened to stroll at some moment into the gar-
den and to sit in a little arbor, which was covered with a jasmine
vine. Duncan Trice returned to the house to get punch for the
three of them, leaving Annabelle and Cass seated side by side in
the arbor. Cass commented on the sweetness of the scent of jasmine.
All at once, she burst out (“her voice low-pitched and with its hus-
kiness, but in a vehemence which astonished me”), “Yes, yes, it is
too sweet. It is sujffocating. I shall suffocate.” And she laid her right
hand, with the fingers spread, across the bare swell of her bosom
above the pressure of the corset.

“Thinking her taken by some sudden illness,” Cass recorded in
the journal, “I asked if she were faint. She said, No, in a very low,
husky voice. Nevertheless I rose, with the expressed intention of
getting a glass of water for her. Suddenly she said, quite harshly and
to my amazement, because of her excellent courtesy, ‘Sit down, sit
down, I don’t want water!’ So somewhat distressed in mind that un-
wittingly I might have ofEended, I sat down. I looked across the gar-
den where in the light of the moon several couples promenaded
down the paths between the low hedges. I could hear the sound of
her breathing beside me. It was disturbed and irregular. All at once
she said, ‘How old are you, Mr. Mastern?’ I said twenty-two. Then
she said, 1 am twenty-nine.’ I stammered something, in my surprise.
She laughed as though at my confusion, and said, ‘Yes, I am seven
years older than you, Mr. Mastern. Does that surprise you, Mr.
Mastern?’ I replied in the ajQBrmative. Then she said, ‘Seven years
is a long time. Seven years ago you were a child, Mr. Mastern.’
Then she laughed, with a sudden sharpness, but quickly stopped
herself to add, ‘But I wasn’t a child. Not seven years ago, Mr.
Mastern.’ I did not answer her, for there was no thought clear in
my head. I sat there in confusion, but in the middle of my con-
fusion I was trying to see what she would have looked like as a
child. I could call up no image. Then her husband returned from
the house.”

178

A few days later Cass went back to Mississippi to demote some
months to his plantation, and, under the guidance of Gilbert, to
go once to Jackson, the capital, and once to Vicksburg. It was a
busy summer. Now Cass could see clearly what Gilbert intended:
to make him rich and to put him into politics. It was a flattering
and glittering prospect, and one not beyond reasonable expectation
for a young man whose brother was Gilbert Mastern. ('‘My brother
is a man of great taciturnity and strong mind, and when he speaks,
though he practices no graces and ingratiations, all men, especially
those of the sober sort who have responsibility and power, weigh
his words with respect.”) So the summer passed, under the strong
hand and cold eye of Gilbert. But toward the end of the season,
when already Cass was beginning to give thought to his return to
Transylvania, an envelope came addressed to him from Lexington,
in an unfamiliar script. When Cass unfolded the single sheet of
paper a small pressed blossom, or what he discovered to be such,
slipped out. For a moment he could not think what it was, or why
it was in his hand. Then he put it to his nostrils. The odor, now
faint and dusty, was the odor of jasmine.

The sheet of paper had been folded twice, to make four equal
sections. In one section, in a clean, strong, not large script, he read:
*'Oh, CassI” That was all.

It was enough.

One drizzly autumn afternoon, just after bis return to Lexington,
Cass called at the Trice house to pay his respects. Duncan Trice w^as
not there, having sent word that he had been urgently detained in
the town and would be home for a late dinner. Of that afternoon,
Cass wrote: “I found myself in the room alone with her. There were
shadows, as there had been that afternoon, almost a year before,
when I first saw her in that room, and when I had thought that her
eyes were black. She greeted me civilly, and I replied and stepped
back after having shaken her hand. Then I realized that she was
looking at me fixedly, as I at her. Suddenly, her lips parted slightly
and gave a short exhalation, like a sigh or suppressed moan. As of
one accord, we moved toward each other and embraced. No words
passed between us as we stood there. We stood there for a long
time, or so it seemed. I held her body close to me in a strong em-
brace, but we did not exchange a kiss, which upon recollection has
since seemed strange. But was it strange? Was it strange that some
remnant of shame should forbid us to look each other in the face?
I felt and heard my heart racing within my bosom, with a loose
feeling as though it were unmoored and were leaping at random
An a great cavity within me, but at the same time I scarcely accepted

179

the fact of my situation. I was somehow possessed by inaredulity,
even as to my identity, as I stood there and my nostrils were filled
with the fragrance of her hair. It was not to be believed that I was
Cass Mastern, who stood thus in the house of a friend and bene-
factor. There %vas no remorse or horror at the turpitude of the act,
but only the incredulity which I have referred to. (One feels in-
credulity at the first breaking of a habit, but horror at the viola-
tion of a principle. Therefore what virtue and honor I had known
in the past had been an accident of habit and not the fruit of will.
Or can virtue be the fruit of human will? The thought is pride.)

*‘As I have said, we stood there for a long time in a strong em-
brace, but with her face lowered against my chest, and my own eyes
staring across the room and out a window into the deepening ob-
scurity of the evening. WTien she finally raised her face, I saw that
she had been silently weeping. Why was she weeping? I have asked
myself that question. Was it because even on the verge of commit-
ting an irremediable wrong she could weep at the consequence of
an act which she felt powerless to avoid? Was it because the man
who held her was much younger than she and his embrace gave her
the reproach of youth and seven years? Was it because he had come
seven years too late and could not come in innocence? It does not
matter what the cause. If it was the first, then the tears can only
prove that sentiment is no substitute for obligation, if the second,
then they only prove that pity of the self is no substitute for wis-
dom. But she shed the tears and finally lifted her face to mine with
those tears bright in her large eyes, and even now, though those
tears were my ruin, I cannot wish them unshed, for they testify to
the warmth of her heart and prove that whatever her sin (and
mine) she did not step to it with a gay foot and with the eyes hard
with lust and fleshly cupidity.

*‘The tears were my ruin, for when she lifted her face to me some
streak of tenderness w^as mixed into my feelings, and my heart
seemed to flood itself into my bosom to fill that great cavity wherein
it had been leaping. She said, *Cass'— the first time she had ever
addressed me by my Christian name. ‘Yes,* I replied. ‘Kiss me,’ she
said very simply, ‘you can do it now.’ So I kissed her. And thereupon
in the blindness of our mortal blood and in the appetite of our
hearts we performed the act. There in that very room with the
servants walking with soft feet somewhere in the house and with
the door to the room open and with her husband expected, and not
yet in the room the darkness of evening. But we were secure in our
very recklessness, as though the lustful heart could give forth a
doud of darkness in which we were shrouded, even as Venus once

180

shrouded Aeneas in a cloud so that he passed unspied among men
to approach the city of Dido. In such cases as ours the very reckless-
ness gives security as the strength of the desire seems to give the
sanction of Justice and righteousness.

“Though she had wept and had seemed to perform the act in a
sadness and desperation, immediately afterward she spoke cheer*
fully to me. She stood in the middle of the room pressing her hair
into place, and I stumblingly ventured some remark about our fu-
ture, a remark very vague for my being was still confused, but she
responded, ‘Oh, let us not think about it now,’ as diough I had
broached a subject of no consequence. She promptly summoned a
servant and asked for lights. They were brought and thereupon I
inspected her face to find it fresh and unmarked. When her hus-
band came, she greeted him familiarly and affectionately, and as I
witnessed it my own heart was wTenched, but not, I must confess,
with compunction. Rather with a violent jealousy. Wlien he spoke
to me and took my hand, so great was my disturbance that I was
sure that my face could not but betray it.”

So began the second phase of the story^ of Cass Mastern. Ail that
year, as before, he was often in the house of Duncan Trice, and as
before he was often \rith him in field sports, gambling, drinking,
and racegoing. He learned, he says, to “wear his brow unwrinkled,”
to accept the condition of things. As for Annabeiie Trice, he says
that sometimes looking back, he could scarcely persuade himself
that “she had shed tears.” She was, he says, “of a warm nature, reck-
less and passionate of disposition, hating all mention of the future
(she would never let me mention times to come), agile, resourceful,
and cheerful in devising to gratify our appetites, but with a wom-
anly tenderness such as any man might prize at a sanctified hearth-
side.” She must indeed have been agile and resourceful, for to carry
on such a liaison undetected in that age and place must have been
a problem. There was a kind of summerhouse at the foot of the
Trice garden, which one could enter unobsen'^ed from an alley.
Some of their meetings occurred there. A half-sister of Annabeiie
Trice, who lived in Lexington, apparently assisted the lovers or
winked at their relationship, but, it seems, only after some pressure
by Annabeiie, for Cass mentions “a stormy scene.'’ So some of the
meetings were there. But now and then Duncan Trice had to be
out of to%vn on business, and on those occasions Cass would be ad-
mitted, late at night, to the house, even during a period when Anna-
belle’s mother and father were staying there; so he actually lay in
the very bed belonging to Duncan Trice.

There were, however, other meetings, unplanned and unpredict^

181

able moments snatched when they found themsehes left alone to-
gether. “Scarce a corner, cranny, or protected nook or angle of my
friend’s trusting house did we not at one time or another defile,
and that even in the full and shameless light of day,” Cass wote in
the journal, and when Jack Burden, the student of history, went
to Lexington and went to see the old Trice house he remembered
the sentence. The town had grown up around the house, and the
gardens, except for a patch of latvm, were gone. But the house was
w’ell maintained (some people named Miller lived there and by and
large respected die place) and Jack Burden was permitted to inspect
the premises. He wandered about the room where the first meeting
had taken place and she had raised her eyes to Cass Mastern above
the newly lighted candles and w^here, a year later, she had uttered
the sigh, or suppressed moan, and stepped to his arms; and out into
the hall, which ivas finely proportioned and with a graceful stair;
and into a small, shadowy library; and to a kind of back hall, which
w^as a well “protected nook or angle” and had, as a matter of fact,
furniture adequate to the occasion. Jack Burden stood in the main
hail, which was cool and dim, with dully glittering floors, and, in
the silence of the house, recalled that period, some seventy years
before, of the covert glances, the guarded whispers, the abrupt
rustling of silk in the silence (the costume of the period certainly
had not been designed to encourage casual vice), the sharp breath,
the reckless sighs. Well, all of that had been a long time before,
and Annabelle Trice and Cass Mastern were long since deader than
mackerel, and Mrs. Miller, w^ho came down to give Jack Burden a
cup of tea (she w^as flattered by the “historical” interest in her
house, though she didn’t guess the exact nature of the case), cer-
tainly was not “agile” and didn’t look “resourceful” and probably
had used up all her energy in the Ladies Altar Guild of St. Luke’s
Episcopal Church and in the D.A.R.

The period of the intrigue, the second phase of the story of Cass
Mastern, lasted all of one academic year, part of the summer (for
Cass was compelled to go back to Mississippi for his plantation
affairs and to attend the wedding of his sister Lavinia, who married
a well-connected young man named Willis Burden), and well
through the next winter, when Cass w^as back in Lexington. Then,
on March 19, 1854, Duncan Trice died, in his library (which was a
^‘protected nook or angle” of his house), with a lead slug nearly the
size of a man’s thumb in his chest. It was quite obviously an acci-
dent.

The widow sat in church, upright and immobile. W^en she once
raised her veil to touch at her eyes with a handkerchief, Cass

182

Mastern saw that the cheek was “pale as marble but for a single
flushed spot, like the flush of fever/' But even when the veil was
lowered he detected the fixed, bright eyes glittering “within that
artificial shadow%’'

Cass Mastern, wdth five other young men of Lexington, cronies
and boon companions of the dead man, carried the coffin. “The
coffin w’hich I carried seemed to ha\e no weight, although friend
had been of large frame and had inclined to stoutness. As we pro-
ceeded wdth it, I marvelled at tlie fact of its lightness, and once the
fancy flitted into my mind that he was not in die coffin at all, that
it was empty, and that all the affair was a masquerade or mock show
carried to ludicrous and blasphemous length, for no purpose, as in
a dream. Or to deceive me, the fancy came. I was the object of the
deception, and all the other people were in league and conspiracy
against me. But wiien that thought came, I suddenly felt a sense
of great cunning and a wild exhilaration. I had been too sharp to
be caught so. I had penetrated the deception. I had the impulse to
hurl the coffin to the ground and see its emptiness burst open and
to laugh in triumph. But I did not, and I saw the coffin sink be-
neath the level of the earth on which we stood and receive the first
clods upon it.

“As soon as the sound of the first clods striking the coffin came
to me, I felt a great relief, and then a most overmastering desire. I
looked toward her. She was kneeling at the foot of the grave, with
what thoughts I could not know. Her head was inclined slightly and
the veil was over her face. The bright sun poured over her black-clad
figure. I could not take my eyes from the sight. The posture seemed
to accentuate the charms of her person and to suggest to my in-
flamed senses the suppleness of her members. Even the funereal tint
of her costume seemed to add to the provocation. The sunshine was
hot upon my neck and could be felt through the stuff of my coat
upon my shoulders. It was preternaturally bright so that I was
blinded by it and my eyes were blinded and my senses swam. But
all the while I could hear, as from a great distance, the scraping
of the spades upon the piled earth and the muffled sound of earth
falling into the excavation."

That evening Cass went to the summerhouse in the garden. It
was not by appointment, simply on impulse. He waited there a
long time, but she finally appeared, dressed in black “which was
scarce darker than the night." He did not speak, or make any sign
as she approached, “gliding like a shadow among shadows," but re-
mained standing where he had been, in the deepest obscurity of the
summerhouse. Even when she entered, he did not betray his pres^

183

ence. “I can not be certain that any premeditation was in my silence.
It was prompted by an overpowering impulse -which gidpped me
and sealed my throat and froze my limbs. Before that moment, and
afterwards, I hnew that it is dishonorable to spy upon another, but
at the moment no such considerations presented diemselves. I had
to keep my eyes fixed upon her as she stood there thinking herself
alone in die darkness of the structure. I had the fancy that since she
thought herself alone I might penetrate into her being, that I might
learn what change, wdiat effect, had been mought by the death of
her husband. The passion which had seized me to the very extent of
paroxysm that afternoon at the brink of my friend’s grave was gone.
I was perfectly cold now. But I had to know, to try to know. It w’as
as though I might know myself by knowing her. (It is human defect
—to try to know oneself by the self of another. One can only know
oneself in God and in His great eye.)

*‘She entered the summerhouse and sank upon one of the benches,
not more than a few feet from my own location. For a long time I
stood tliere, peering at her. She sat perfectly upright and rigid. At
last I whispered her name, as low as might be. If she heard it, she
gave no sign. So I repeated her name, in the same fashion, and
again. Upon the third utterance, she whispered, ‘Yes,' but she did
not change her posture or turn her head. Then I spoke more loudly,
again uttering her name, and instantly, with a motion of wild alarm
she rose, with a strangled cry and her hands lifted toward her face.
She reeled, and it seemed that she would collapse to tiie floor, but
she gained control of herself and stood there staring at me. Stam-
meringly, I made my apology, saying that I had not wanted to
startle her, that I had understood her to answer yes to my whisper
before I spoke, and I asked her, ‘Did you not answer to my whis-
per?'

“She replied diat she had.

“ ‘Then why were you distressed when I spoke again?' I asked her.

“ ‘Because I did not know that you were here,* she said.

“ ‘But/ I said, ‘you say that you had just heard my whisper and
had answered to it, and now you say that you did not know I was
here/

“‘I did not know that you were here,' she repeated, in a low
voice, and the import of what she was saying dawned upon me.

“ ‘Listen/ I said, ‘when you heard the whisper— did you recognize
ft as my voice?'

“She stared at me> not answering.

“ ‘Answer me,' I demanded, for I had to know-

184

'*She continued to stare, and jfinalh replied hesitantly, do not
know.*

‘You tliought it was—* I began, but before I could utter the
words she had flung herself upon me, clasping me in desperation
like a person frar.Dc with drowning, and ejaculating, ‘No, no, it
does not matter w’hat I thought, you are here, }ou are here!’
she drew my face down and pressed her lips against mine to stop
my words. Her lips were cold, but mey hung upon mine.

“I too was perfectly cold, as of a mortal chill. And the coldness
was the final horror of die act which we performed, as though two
dolls should parody the shame and filth of man to make it doubly
shameful.

“After, she said to me, ‘Had I not found you here tonight, it
could never have been betw^een us again.*

“ AVhy?* I demanded.

“ ‘It was a sign,* she said.

“ ‘A sign?* I demanded.

“ ‘A sign that we cannot escape, that we—* and she interrupted
herself, to resume, whispering fiercely in the dark— ‘I do not want
to escape— it is a sign— whatever I have done is done.* She grew"
quiet for a moment, then she said, ‘Give me your hand.*

“I gave her my right hand. She grasped it, dropped it, and said,
‘The other, the other hand.*

“I held it out, across my own body, for I was sitting on her left.
She seized it with her own left hand, bringing her hand upward
from below" to press my hand flat against her bosom. Then, fum-
biingly, she slipped a ring upon my finger, the finger next to the
smallest.

“ ‘What is that?* I asked.

“ ‘A ring,* she answered, paused, and added, ‘It is his ring.'

“Then I recalled that he, my friend, had always worn a w"edding
ring, and I felt the metal cold upon my flesh. ‘Did you take it off
of his finger?’ 1 asked, and the thought shook me.

“ ‘No,’ she said.

“ ‘No?* I questioned.

“ ‘No,* she said, ‘he took it off. It was the only time he ever took
it off.*

“I sat beside her, waiting for what, I did not know, while she
held my hand pressed against her bosom. I could feel it rise and
fall. I could say nothing.

“Then she said, ‘Do you want to know how— how he took it off?*

“ ‘Yes/ I said in the dark, and waiting for her to speak, I moved
my tongue out upon my dry lips.

185

“ 'Listen/ sne commanded me in an imperious whisper, 'that eve-
ning after— after it happened— after the house was quiet again, I
sat in m) room, in the little chair by the dressing table, where I
ahva)s sit for Phebe to let down my hair. I had sat there out of
habit, I suppose, for I was numb all over. I watched Phebe pre-
paring the bed for the night.' (Phebe was her w^aiting maid, a
comely yellow wench somewhat given to the fits and sulls.) 'I saw
Phebe remo\e the bolster and then look down at a spot where the
bolster had lain, on my side of the bed. She picked something up
and came toward me. She stared at me— and her eyes, they are ) el-
low, }ou look into them and you can't see what is in them— she
stared at me— a long time— and then she held out her hand, clenched
shut and she watched me— and then— slow, so slow— she opened up
the fingers— and there lay the ring on the palm of her hand— and
I knew it was his ring but all I thought was, it is gold and it is
h ing in a gold hand. For Phebe's hand was gold— I had never no-
ticed how her hand is the color of pure gold. Then I looked up
and she was still staring at me, and her eyes were gold, too, and
bright and hard like gold. And I knew that she knew^*

" 'Knew?' I echoed, like a question, but I knew, too, now. My
friend had learned the truth— from the coldness of his wife, from
the gossip of servants— and had drawm the gold ring from his finger
and carried it to the bed wrhere he had lain with her and had put
it beneath her pillow and had gone down and shot himself but
under such circumstances that no one save his wife would ever
guess it to be more than an accident. But he had made one fault
of calculation. The yellow wench had found the ring.

" 'She knows,' she whispered, pressing my hand hard against her
bosom, which heaved and palpitated with a new wildness. 'She
knows— and she looks at me— she will always look at me.' Then
suddenly her voice dropped, and a wailing intonation came into it:
'She will tell. Ail of them will know. All of them in the house will
look at me and know— when they hand me the dish— when they
come into the room— and their feet don't make any noise!' She rose
abruptly, dropping my hand. I remained seated, and she stood
there beside me, her back toward me, the whiteness of her face and
hands no longer visible, and to my sight the blackness of her cos-
tume faded into the shadow, even in such proximity. Suddenly, in
a voice which I did not recognize for its hardness, she said in the
darkness above me, 'I will not abide it, I will not abide it!' Then
she turned, and with a swooping motion leaned to kiss me upon
the mouth. Then she was gone from my side and I heard her feet

)86

running up the gra\el of the path. I sat there in the darkness for
a time longer, turning the ring upon my finger.''

After that meeting in the summerhouse, Cass did not see Anna-
belle Trice for some days. He learned that she had gone to Louis-
ville, where, he recalled, she had close friends. She had, as was
natural, taken Phebe with her. Then he heard that she had re-
turned, and that night, late, w^ent to the summerhouse in the
garden. She was there, sitting in the dark. She greeted him. She
seemed, he wote later, peculiarly cut off, remote, and vague in
manner, like a somnambulist or a person diugged. He asked about
her trip to Louisville, and she replied brieflv that she had been
dowm the river to Paducah. He remarked that he had not known
that she had friends in Paducah, and she said that she had none
there. Then, all at once, she turned on him, the vagueness chang-
ing to violence, and burst out, 'Tou are prying— you are prydng
into my affairs— and I will not tolerate it." Gass stammered out
some excuse before she cut in to say, “But if you must know, I'll
tell you. I took her there."

For a moment Cass was genuinely confused.

“Her?" he questioned.

“Phebe," she replied, “I took her to Paducah, and she's gone."

“Gone— gone where?"

“Down the river," she answered, repeated, “down the river,” and
laughed abruptly, and added, “and she won't look at me any more
like that."

“You sold her?"

“Yes, I sold her. In Paducah, to a man who was making up a
coffle of Negroes for New Orleans. And nobody knows me in
Paducah, nobody knew I was there, nobody knows I sold her, for
I shall say she ran away into Illinois. But I sold her. For thirteen
hundred dollars."

“You got a good price," Cass said, “even for a yellow girl as
sprightly as Phebe." And, as he reports in the journal, he laughed
with some “bitterness and rudeness," though he does not say wliy.

“Yes," she replied, “I got a good price. I made him pay every
penny she was worth. And then do you know w’hat I did with the
money, do you?"

“No."

“When I came off the boat at Louisville, there was an old man,
a nigger, sitting on the landing stage, and he was blind and picking
on a guitar and singing "Old Dan Tucker.' I took the money out
of my bag and walked to him and laid it in his old hat.”

187

"If you were going to give the money away— if ) ou felt the money
tvas defiled— why didn’t you free her?” Cass asked.

"She’d stay right here, she wouldn’t go away, she w^ould stay
right here and look at me. Oh, no, she 'wouldn’t go away, for she’s
the wdfe of a man the Motle}'s have, tlieir coachman. Oh, she’d stay
right here and look at me and tell, tell what she knows, and I’ll
not abide it!”

Then Cass said, “If you had spoken to me I would have bought
the man from Mr. Motley and set him free, too.”

“He w^ouldn’t have sold,” she said, “the Motleys won’t sell a
servant.”

“Even to be freed?” Cass continued, but she cut in, “I tell you
I w^on’t have you interfering wnth my affairs, do you understand
that?” And she rose from his side and stood in the middle of the
summerhouse, and he saw the glimmer of her face in the shadow^
and heard her agitated breathing. “I thought you were fond of
her,” Cass said.

“I was,” she said, “until— until she looked at me like that.”

“You know -u^hy you got that price for her?” Cass asked, and
without waiting for an answer, w^ent on, “Because she’s yellow and
comely and well-made. Oh, the drovers w^ouldn’t take her down
chained in a cofl3e. They wouldn’t wear her down. They’ll take her
down the river soft. And you know w^hy?”

“Yes, I know why,” she said, “and what is it to you? Are you so
charmed by her?”

“That is unfair,” Cass said.

“Oh, I see, Mr. Mastern,” she said, “oh, I see, you are concerned
for the honor of a black coachman. It is a very delicate sentiment,
Mr. Mastern. Why—” and she came to stand above him as he still
sat on the bench— “why did you not show some such delicate con-
cern for the honor of your friend? Who is now dead.”

According to the journal, there was, at this moment, “a tempest
of feeling” in his breast. He WTOte: “Thus I heard put into words
for the first time the accusation which has ever in all climes been
that most calculated to make wince a man of proper nurture or
natural rectitude. What the hardened man can bear to hear from
the still small voice within, may yet be when spoken by any exter-
nal tongue an accusation dire enough to drain his very cheeks of
blood. But it was not only that accusation in itself, for in very
truth I had supped fuU of that horror and made it my long
familiar. It was not merely the betrayal of my friend. It was not
merely the death of my friend, at whose breast I had levelled the
weapon. I could have managed somehow to live with those facts.

188

But I suddenly felt that the world outside of me was shifting and
the substance of things, and that the process had only begun of
a general disintegration of which I was the center. At that moment
of perturbation, when the cold sw^at broke on my brow, I did not
frame any sentence distinctly to my mind. But I have looked back
and wTestled to know the truth. It w'as not the fact that a slave
woman was being sold away from the house where she had had pro-
tection and kindness and away from the arms of her husband into
debauchery. I knew that such things had happened in fact, and I
was no child for after my arrival in Lexington and my acquaint-
ance with the looser sort of companions, the sportsmen and the
followers of the races, I had m}seif enjoyed such diversions. It was
not only the fact that the woman for whom I had sacrificed my
friend's life and my honor could, in her own suffering, turn on me
with a cold rage and the language of insult so that I did not recog-
nize her. It was, instead, the fact that all of these things— the death
of my friend, the betrayal of Phebe, the suffering and rage and
great change of the woman I had loved— all had come from my
single act of sin and perfidy, as the boughs from the bole and the
leaves from the bough. Or to figure the matter differently, it was
as though the vibration set up in the whole fabric of the world
by my act had spread infinitely and with ever increasing power and
no man could know the end. I did not put it into words in such
fashion, but I stood there shaken by a tempest of feeling.*'

When Cass had somewhat controlled his agitation, he said,
whom did you sell the girl?’*

‘‘What’s it to you?” she answered.

“To whom did you sell the girl?” he repeated.

“I’ll not tell you,” she said.

“I vrill find out,” he said. “I will go to Paducah and find out.”

She grasped him by the arm, driving her fingers deep into the
flesh, “like talons,” and demanded, “Why— why are you going?”

“To find her,” he said. “To find her and buy her and set her
free.” He had not premeditated this. He heard the words, he wrote
in the journal, and knew that that was his intention. “To find her
and buy her and set her free,” he said, and felt the grasp on his
arm released and then in the dark suddenly felt the rake of her
nails down his cheek, and heard her voice in a kind of “wild
sibilance” saying, “If you do— if you do— oh. I’ll not abide it— I will
notl”

She flung herself from his side and to the bench. He heard her
gasp and sob, “a hard dry sob like a man’s.” He did not move.
Then he heard her voice, “If you do— if you do— she looked at me

189

that way, and 111 not abide it—if \ou do—"' Then after a pause,
very quieth, “If you do, I shall never see you again.”

He made no reply. He stood there for some minutes, he did not
know how long, then left the summerhouse, where she still sat, and
walked down the alley.

The next morning he left for Paducah. He learned the name of
die trader, but he also learned that the trader had sold Phebe (a
yellow wench who answered to Phebe's description) to a “private
party*' who happened to be in Paducah at the time but who had
gone on downriver. His name was unknown in Paducah. The
trader had presumably sold Phebe so that he would be free to
accompany his cofHe when it had been made up. He had now
headed, it w^as said, into South Kentucky, with a few bucks and
wenches, to pick up more. As Cass had predicted, he had not
wanted to wear Phebe down by taking her in the coffle. So getting
a good figure of profit in Paducah, he had sold her there. Cass went
south as far as Bowling Green, but lost track of his man there. So
rather hopelessly, he wrote a letter to the trader, in care of the
market at New Orleans, asking for the name of the purchaser and
any information about him. Then he swung back north to Lex-
ington.

At Lexington he went down to West Short Street, to the Lewis
C. Robards barracoon, which Mr. Robards had converted from the
old Lexington Theatre a few years earlier. He had a notion that
Mr. Robards, the leading trader of the section, might be able,
through his downriver connections, to locate Phebe, if enough of
a commission was in sight. At the barracoon there was no one in
the office except a boy, who said that Mr. Robards was downriver
but that Mr. Simms was “holding things down” and was over at
the “house” at an “inspection.** So Cass went next door to the
house. (When Jack Burden was in Lexington investigating the life
of Cass Mastern, he saw the “house” still standing, a two-story brick
building of the traditional residential type, roof running length-
wise, door in center of front, window on each side, chimney at each
end, lean-to in back. Robards had kept his “choice stock” there
and not in the coops, to wait for “inspection.**)

Cass found the main door unlocked at the house, entered the
hall, saw no one, but heard laughter from above. He mounted the
stairs and discovered, at the end of the hall, a small group of men
gathered at an open door. He recognized a couple of them, young
hangers-on he had seen about town and at the track. He approached
and asked if Mr. Simms was about. “Inside,** one of the men said,
“showing.** Over the heads, Cass could see into the room. First he

190

saw a short, strongly made man, a \arnished-iooking man, with
black hair, black neckcloth, large bright black eyes, and black coat,
with a crop in his hand. Cass knew immediately that he was a
French “speculator,” who was buying “fancies” for Louisiana. The
Frenchman was staring at something beyond Cass's range of vision.
Cass moved farther and could see within.

There he saw the man whom he took to be 'Mr. Simms, a nonde-
script fellow in a plug hat, and be\ond him the figure of a woman.
She was a very young woman, some tvventy )ears old perhaps, rather
slender, with skin slightly darker than ivor\, probably an octaroon,
and hair crisp rather than kinky, and deep dark liquid eyes, slightly
bloodshot, which stared at a spot above and beyond the French-
man. She did not wear the ordinary plaid Osnaburg and kerchief
of the female slave up for sale, but a white, loosely cut dress, with
elbow-length sleeves, and skirts to the floor and no kerchief, only
a band to her hair. Beyond her, in the neatly furnished room
(“quite genteel,” the journal called it, while noting the barred
windows), Cass saw a rocking chair and little table, and on the
table a sewing basket with a piece of fancy needlework lying there
with the needle stuck in it, “as though some respectable young lady
or householder had dropped it casually aside upon rising to greet
a guest.” Cass recorded that somehow he found himself staring at
the needlework.

“Yeah,” Mr. Simms was saying, “yeah.” And grasped the girl by
the shoulder to swing her slowl) around for a complete view. Then
he seized one of her wrists and lifted the arm to shoulder level
and worked it back and forth a couple of times to show the supple
articulation, saying, “Yeah.” That done, he drew the arm forward,
holding it toward the Frenchman, the hand hanging limply from
the wrist which he held. (The hand was, according to the journal,
“well moulded, and the fingers tapered.”) “Yeah,” Mr. Simms said,
“look at that-air hand. Ain't no lady got a littler, teensier hand.
And round and soft, yeah?”

“Ain't she got nuthen else round and soft?” one of the men at
the door called, and the others laughed.

“Yeah,” Mr, Simms said, and leaned to take the hem of her
dress, which with a delicate flirting motion he lifted higher than
her waist, while he reached out with his other hand to wad the
cloth and draw it into a kind of “awkward girdle” about her waist.
Still holding the wad of cloth he walked around her, forcing her
to turn (she turned “without resistance and as though in a trance”)
with his motion until her small buttocks were toward the door.
“Round and soft, boys,” Mr, Simms said, and gave her a good

191

whack on the near buttock to make the hesh tremble. “Ever git
}ore hand on anything rounder ner softer, bo\s?’* he demanded.
“Hit's a cushion, I declare. And shake like sweet jelly.”

“God-a-Mighty and got on stockings/' one of the men said.

While the other men laughed, the Frencliman stepped to the
side of the girl, reached out to lay the tip of his riding crop at the
little depression just above the beginning of the swell of the but-
tocks. He held the tip delicately there for a moment, then flat-
tened the crop across the back and moved it down slowly, evenly
across each buttock, to trace the fullness of the cuiv'e. “Turn her/'
he said ITl his foreign voice.

Mr. Simms obediently carried the wad around, and the body
followed in the half revolution. One of the men at the door whis-
tled. The Frenchman laid his crop across the woman’s belly as
though he were a “carpenter measuring something or as to demon-
strate its flatness,” and moved it down as before, tracing the struc-
ture, until it came to rest across the thighs, below the triangle. Then
he let his hand fall to his side, with the crop. “Open your mouth,”
he said to the girl.

She did so, and he peered earnestly at her teeth. Then he leaned
and whiffed her breath. “It is a good breath,” he admitted, as
though grudgingly.

“Yeah,” Mi. Simms said, “yeah, you ain’t a-finden no better
breath.”

“Have you any others?” the Frenchman demanded. “On hand?”

“We got ’em,” Mr. Simms said.

“Let me see,” the Frenchman said, and moved toward the door
with, apparently, the “insolent expectation” that the group there
would dissolve before him. He went out into the hall, Mr. Simms
following. While Mr. Simms locked the door, Cass said to him,
“I wish to speak to you, if you are Mr. Simms.”

“Huh?” Mr. Simms said (“grunted” according to the journal),
but looking at Cass became suddenly civil for he could know from
dress and bearing that Cass was not one of the casual hangers-on.
So Mr. Simms admitted tlie Frenchman to the next room to inspect
its occupant, and returned to Cass. Cass remarked in the journal
that trouble might have been avoided if he had been more careful
to speak in private, but he wrote that at the time tlie matter was
so much upon his mind that the men who stood about were as
shadows to him.

He explained his wish to Mr. Simms, described Phebe as well as
possible, gave the name of the trader in Paducah, and offered a
liberal commission. Mr. Simms seemed dubious, promised to do

192

what he could, and then said, ‘‘But nine outa ten )ou won't git her,
Mister. And we got sumthen here better. You done seen Delph}’,
and she's nigh white as airy w'oman, and a sight more juic}, and
that gal you talk about is nuthen but yaller. Now Deiph\— ”

“But the )oung gemmun got a hankeren fer yaller," one of the
hangers-on said, and laughed, and the others laughed too,

Cass curuck him across the mouth. “I struck him with the side
of my fist," Cass wTote, “to bring blood. I struck him without
thought, and I recollect the surprise which visited me w'hen I saw
the blood on his chin and saw^ him draw a bowie from his shirt
front. I attempted to avoid his first bloiv, but received it upon my
left shoulder. Before he could withdraw, I had grasped his wTist
in my right hand, forced it dowm so that I could also use my left
hand, which still had some strength left at that moment, and with
a turning motion of my body I broke his arm across my right hip,
and then knocked him to the floor. I recovered the bowie from the
floor, and with it faced the man who seemed to be the friend of
the man who was now prostrate. He had a knife in his hand, but
he seemed disinclined to pursue the discussion."

Cass declined the assistance of Mr. Simms, pressed a handker-
chief over his wound, walked out of the building and toward his
lodgings, and collapsed on West Short Street. He was carried home.
The next day he was better. He learned that Mrs. Trice had left
the city, presumably for Washington. A couple of days later his
wound infected, and for some time he lay in delirium between life
and death. His recovery was slow, presumably retarded by what he
termed in the journal his “will toward darkness." But his consti-
tution was stronger than his will, and he recovered, to know him-
self as the “chief of sinners and a plague spot on the body of the
human world." He would have committed suicide except for the
fear of damnation for that act, for though “hopeless of Grace I yet
clung to the hope of Grace." But sometimes the very fact of dam-
nation because of suicide seemed to be the very reason for suicide:
he had brought his friend to suicide and the friend, by that act,
was eternally damned; therefore he, Cass Mastem, should, in jus-
tice, insure his own damnation by the same act. “But the Lord
preserved me from self-slaughter for ends which are His and beyond
my knowledge."

Mrs. Trice did not come back to Lexington.

He returned to Mississippi. For two years he operated his plan-
tation, read the Bible, prayed, and, strangely enough, prospered
greatly, almost as though against his will. In the end he repaid
Gilbert his debt, and set free his slaves. He had some notion of

193

operating the plantation with the same force on a w^age basis. “You
fool/’ Gilbert said to him, “be a private fool i£ )ou must, but in
God’s name don’t be a public one. Do )ou think you can work them
and them free? One day wwk, one day loaf. Do you think you can
have a passel of free niggers next door to a plantation with slaves?
If you did have to set them free, you don’t have to spend the rest
of your natural life nursing them. Get them out of this country,
and take up law or medicine. Or preach the Gospel and at least
make a living out of all this prating.’’ Cass tried for more than a
year to operate the plantation with his free Negroes, but was com-
pelled to confess that the project was a failure. “Get them out of
the countrv,” Gilbert said to him. “And why don’t you go with
them. Why don’t you go North?”

“1 belong here,” Cass replied.

“Well, why don’t you preach Abolition right here?” Gilbert de-
manded. “Do something, do anything, but stop making a fool of
yourself trying to raise cotton with free niggers.”

“Perhaps I shall preach Abolition,” Cass said, “some day. Even
here. But not now. I am not worthy to instruct others. Not now.
But meanw^hile there is my example. If it is good, it is not lost.
Nothing is ever lost.”

“Except your mind,” Gilbert said, and flung heavily from the
room.

There was a sense of trouble in the air. Only Gilbert’s great
wealth and prestige and scarcely concealed humorous contempt for
Cass saved Cass from ostracism, or worse. (“His contempt for me
is a shield,” Cass wTote. “He treats me like a wayward and silly
child who may learn better and w^ho does not have to be taken
seriously. Therefore my neighbors do not take me seriously.”) But
trouble did come. One of Cass’s Negroes had a broad-wife on a
plantation near by. After she had had some minor trouble with
the overseer, the husband stole her from the plantation and ran
away. Toward the Tennessee border the pair were taken. The man,
resisting ofl&cers, was shot; the woman was brought back. “See,”
Gilbert said, “ail you have managed to do is get one nigger killed
and one nigger whipped. I offer my congratulations.” So Cass put
his free Negroes on a boat bound upriver, and never heard of
them again.

“I saw the boat head out into the channel, and watched the
wheels churn against the strong current, and my spirit was troubled.
I knew that the Negroes were passing from one misery to another,
and that the hopes they now carried would be blighted. They had
kissed my hands and wept for joy, but I could take no part in their

194

rejoicing. I had not flattered m}self that I had done an\ thing foi
them. WTiat I had done I had done for mvself, to relieve my spirit
of a burden, the burden of their misery and their eves upon me.
The wife of mv dead friend had found the eyes of the girl Phebe
upon her and had gone wdld and had ceased to be herself and had
sold the girl into misery. I had found their eyes upon me and had
freed them into misery, lest I should do worse. For many cannot
bear their eyes upon them, and enter into evil and cruel wa}s in
their desperation. There was in Lexington a decade and more
before my stay in that city, a wealthy lawyer named Fielding L,
Turner, who had married a lady of position from Boston. This lady
Caroline Turner, who had never had blacks around her and who
had been nurtured in sentiments opposed to the institution of
human servitude, quickly became notorious for her abominable
cruelties performed in her fits of passion. Ail persons of the com-
munity reprehended her floggings, which she performed with her
own hands, uttering meanwhile little cries in her throat, according
to report. Once while she was engaged in flogging a servant in an
apartment on the second floor of her palatial home, a small Negro
boy entered the room and began to whimper. She seized him and
bodily hurled him through the window of the apartment so that
he fell upon stone below and broke his back to become a cripple
for his days. To protect her from the process of law and the
wrath of the community, Judge Turner committed her to a lunatic
asylum. But later the physicians said her to be of sound mind and
released her. Her husband in his will left her no slaves, for to do
so would, the will said, be to doom them to misery in life and a
speedy death. But she procured slaves, among them a yellow coach-
man named Richard, mild of manner, sensible, and of plausible
disposition. One day she had him chained and proceeded to flog
him. But he tore himself from the chains that held him to the
wall and seized the woman by the throat and strangled her. Later
he was captiured and hanged for murder, though many wished that
his escape had been contrived. This story was told me in Lexing-
ton. One lady said to me, ‘Mrs, Turner did not understand Ne-
groes/ And another, ‘Mrs. Turner did it because she was from
Boston where the Abolitionists are.* But I did not understand.
Then, much later, I began to understand. I understood that Mrs.
Turner flogged her Negroes for the same reason that the wife of
my friend sold Phebe down the river: she could not bear their
eyes upon her. I understand, for I can no longer bear their eyes
upon me. Perhaps only a man like my brother Gilbert can in the
midst of evil retain enough of innocence and strength to bear then

195

eyes upon him and to do a little justice in tlie terms of the great
injustice."

So Cass, who had a plantation with no one to work it, went to
Jackson, the capital of the state, and applied himself to tlie law.
Before he left, Gilbert came to him and offered to take over the
plantation and work it with a force of his people from his own
gi'eat place on a share basis. Apparently he was still trying to make
Cass rich. But Cass declined, and Gilbert said, “You object to my
woiking it with slaves, is that it? W^eli, let me tell you, if you sell
it, it will be worked with slaves. It is black land and will be watered
with black sweat. Does it make any difference then, which black
sweat falls on it?" And Cass replied that he was not going to sell
the plantation. Then Gilbert, in an apoplectic rage, bellowed, “My
God, man, it is land, donY you understand, it is land, and land
cries out for man's handl" But Cass did not sell. He installed a
caretaker in the house, and rented a little land to a neighbor for
pasture.

He went to Jackson, sat late with his books, and watched trouble
gathering over the land. For it was the autumn of 1858 w'hen he
went to Jackson. On January 9, 1861, Mississippi passed the ordi-
nance of secession. Gilbert had opposed secession, writing to Cass:
“The fools, there is not a factory for arms in the state. Fools not
to have prepared themselves if they have foreseen the trouble.
Fools, if they have not foreseen it, to act thus in the face of facts.
Fools not to temporize now and, if they must, prepare themselves
to strike a blow. I have told responsible men to prepare. All fools."
To which Cass replied: “I pray much for peace." But later, he
wrote: “I have talked with Mr. French, who is, as you know, the
Chief of Ordnance, and he says that they have only old muskets
for troops, and those but flintlocks. The agents have scraped the
state for shotguns, at the behest of Governor Pettus. Shotguns, Mr.
French said, and curled his lips. And what shotguns, he added,
and then told me of a weapon contributed to the cause, an old
musket barrel strapped with metal to a piece of cypress rail crooked
at one end. An old slave gave his treasure to the cause, and does
one laugh or weep?" After Jefferson Davis had come back to Mis-
sissippi, having resigned from the Senate, and had accepted the
command of the troops of Mississippi with the rank of Major
General, Cass called upon him, at the request of Gilbert. He wrote
to Gilbert: “The General says that they have given him 10,000
men, but not a stand of modern rifles. But the General also said,
they have given me a very fine coat with fourteen brass buttons in

196

front and a black velvet collar. Perhaps we can use the buttons in
our shotguns, he said, and smiled.”

Cass saw Mr. Davis once more, for he was with Gilbert on the
steamboat Natchez which carried the netv President of the Con-
federacy on the first stage of his journey from his plantation, Brier-
field, to Montgomery. ”We were on old Mr. Tom Leather's boat,”
Cass WTOte in the journal, “which had been supposed to pick up
the President at a landing a few miles below Brierfield. But Mr.
Davis 'was delayed in leaving his house and w^as rowed out to us,
I leaned on the rail and sa'w the little black skiff proceeding to-
ward us over the red water, A man waved from the skiff to us. The
captain of the Natchez obsen^ed the signal, and gave a great blast
of his boat’s w^histle which made our ears tingle and shivered oul
over the expanse of waters. The boat stopped and the skiff ap-
proached. Mr, Davis was received on board. As the steamboat
moved on, Mr. Davis looked back and lifted his hand in salute to
the Negro servant (Isaiah Montgomery, whom I had known at
Brierfield) who stood in the skift, which rocked in the wash of the
steamboat, and waved his farewell. Later, as we proceeded up-
river towmd the bluffs of Vicksburg, he approached my brother,
with whom I was standing on the deck. We had previously greeted
him. My brother again, and more intimately, congratulated Mr,
Davis, who replied that he could take no pleasure in the honor,
‘I have,’ he said, ’always looked upon the Union with a supersti-
tious reverence and have freely risked my life for its dear flag on
more than one battlefield, and you, gentlemen, can conceive the
sentiment now in me that the object of my attachment for many
years has been withdrawn from me.’ And he continued, *I have in
the present moment only the melancholy pleasure of an easy con-
science.’ Then he smiled, as he did rarely. Thereupon he took his
leave of us and retired wnthin. I had observed how worn to ema-
ciation was his face by illness and care, and how thin the skin lay
over the bone. I remarked to my brother that Mr. Davis did not
look well. He replied, ‘A sick man, it is a fine how-de-do to have
a sick man for a president.’ I responded that there might be no
war, that Mr. Davis hoped for peace. But my brother said, ’Make
no mistake, the Yankees will fight and they will fight well and
Mr. Davis is a fool to hope for peace,* I replied, *A11 good men
hope for peace.’ At this my brother uttered an indistinguishable
exdamation, and said, ’What we want now tiieyVe got into this
is not a good man but a man who can win, and I am not interested
in the luxury of Mr. Davis’s conscience/ Then my brother and I
continued our promenade in silence, and I reflected that Mr* Davis

197

was a good man. But the world is full of good men, I now reflect
as I write these lines do'vm, and yet the world drives hard into
darkness and the blindness of blood, e\en as now late at night I
sit in this hotel room in Vicksburg, and I am moved to ask the
meaning of our virtue. May God hear our prayer!”

Gilbert received a commission as colonel in a cavalry regiment.
Cass enlisted as a private in the Mississippi Rifles. “You could be a
captain,” Gilbert said, “or a major. You’ve got brains enough for
that. And,” he added, “damned few of them have.” Cass replied
that he preferred to be a private soldier, “marching with other
men.” But he could not tell his brother why, or tell his brother
that, though he would march with other men and would carry a
weapon in his hand, he would never take the life of an enemy. “I
must march with these men who march,” he wote in the journal,
“for they are my people and I must partake with them of all bit*
terness, and that more fully. But I cannot take the life of another
man. How can I who have taken the life of my friend, take the life
of an enemy, for I have used up my right to blood.” So Cass
marched away to war, carrying the musket which was, for him, but
a meaningless burden, and wearing on a string, against the flesh
of his chest, beneath the fabric of the gray jacket, the ring which
had once been Duncan Trice’s wedding ring and which Annabeile
Trice, that night in the summerhouse, had slipped onto his finger
as his hand lay on her bosom.

Cass marched to Shiloh, between die fresh fields, for it was early
April, and then into the woods that screened the river. (Dogwood
and redbud would have been out then.) He marched into the
woods, heard the lead whistle by his head, saw the dead men on
the ground, and the next day came out of the woods and moved
in the sullen withdrawal toward Corinth. He had been sure that
he would not survive the battle. But he had survived, and moved
down the crowded road “as in a dream.” And he wrote: “And I
felt that henceforward I should Ih^e in that dream.” The dream
took him into Tennessee again— Chickamauga, Knoxville, Chatta-
nooga, and the nameless skirmishes, and the bullet for which he
waited did not find him. At Chickamauga, when his company
wavered in the enemy fire and seemed about to break in its attack,
he moved steadily up the slope and could not understand his own
inviolability. And the men regrouped, and followed. “It seemed
strange to me,” he wrote, “that I who in God’s will sought death
and could not find it, should in my seeking lead men to it who did
not seek.” When Colonel Hickman congratulated him, he could
“find no words” for answer.

198

But i£ he had put on the gray jacket in anguish of spirit and in
hope of expiation, he came to ^vear it in pride, for it was a jacket
like those worn by the men with whom he marched. “I have seen
men do brave things,” he 'v\Tote, “and they ask for nothing. ' And
he added, “It is not hard to lo\e men for the things they endure
and for the words they do not speak.” More and more, too, there
crept into the journal the comments of the professional soldier,
between the praters and the scruples—criticism of command (of
Bragg after Chickamauga), satisfaction and an impersonal pride in
manemer or gunnery (“the practice of Marlowe’s battery excel-
lent”), and finally the admiration for the feints and dela)s executed
by Johnston’s virtuosity on the approaches to Atlanta, at Buz^a^d's
Roost, Snake Creek Gap, New Hope Church, Kenesaw Mountain
(“there is always a kind of glory, however stained or obscured, in
whatever man’s hand does well, and General Johnston does well”).

Then, outside Atlanta, the bullet found him. He lay in the hos-
pital and rotted slow!) to death. But even before the infection set
in, when the wound in the leg seemed scarcely serious, he knew
that he would die. “I shall die,” he wrote in the journal, “and shall
be spared the end and the last bitterness of war. I have lived to do
no man good, and have seen others suffer for my sin. I do not ques-
tion the Justice of God, that others have suffered for my sin, for
it may be that only by the suffering of the innocent does God
affirm that men are brothers, and brothers in His Holy Name. ^And
in this room with me now, men suffer for sins not theirs, as for
their own. It is a comfort to know that I suffer only for my own.”
He knew not only that he was to die, but that the war was o\er.
“It is over. It is ail over but the dying, w^hich will yet go on.
Though the boil has come to a head and has burst, yet must the
pus flow. Men shall come together yet and die in the common guilt
of man and in the guilt that sent them hither from far places and
distant firesides. But God in His Mercy has spared me the end
Blessed be His Name.”

There was no more in the journal. There was only the letter to
Gilbert, written in the strange hand, dictated by Cass after he had
grown too weak to write. “Remember me, but without grief. If one
of us is lucky, it is I . .

Atlanta fell. In the last confusion, the grave of Cass Mastern was
not marked. Someone at the hospital, a certain Albert Calloway,
kept Cass’s papers and the ring which he had carried on the cord
around his neck, and much later, after the war in fact, sent them
to Gilbert Mastern with a courteous note. Gilbert preseiv^ed the

199

journal, the letters from Cass, the picture of Cass, and the ring on
its cord, and after Gilbert’s death, the heir finally sent the packet
to Jack Burden, the student of history. So they came to rest on the
little pine table in Jack Bui den’s bedroom in the slatternh apart-
ment which he occupied with the two other graduate students, the
unlucky, industrious, and alcoholic one, and the lucky, idle, and
alcoholic one.

Jack Burden lived with the Mastern papers for a year and a half.
He -wanted to knotv ail of the facts of the world in which Cass and
Gilbert Mastern had lived, and he did know many of the facts.
And he felt that he knew Gilbert Mastern. Gilbert Alastern had
kept no journal, but Jack Burden felt that he knew him, the man
with the head like tlie block of bare gi'anite, who had lived through
one world into another and had been at home in both. But the day
came when Jack Burden sat down at the pine table and realized
that he did not know Cass Mastern. He did not have to know Cass
Mastern to get the degree; he only had to know the facts about
Cass Mastern’s world. But -without knowing Cass Mastern, he could
not put down the facts about Cass Mastern’s world. Not that Jack
Bui'den said that to himself. He simply sat there at the pine table,
night after night, staring at the photograph, and writing nothing.
Then he would get up to get a chunk of water, and would stand
in the dark kitchen, holding an old jelly glass in his hand, waiting
for the water to run cold from the tap.

I have said that Jack Burden could not put down the facts about
Cass Mastern’s world because he did not know Cass Mastern. Jack
Burden did not say definitely to himself why he did not know Cass
Mastern. But I (who am what Jack Burden became) look back now,
years later, and try to say why.

Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned
that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like
an enormous spider w’eb and if you touch it, however lightly, at
any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the
drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs
out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the
web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It
does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of
things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever
so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider,
bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors
in. the sun, or like God’s eye, and the fangs dripping.

But how could Jack Burden, being what he was, understand that?

200

He could read die words written man} }ears before in the lonely
plantation house after Cass M astern had freed his slaves or in the
lawyer’s room in Jackson, Mississippi, or b\ candlelight in the
hotel room in Vicksburg after the conversation widi Jefierson Davis
or by the dying campfire in some bivouac while the forms of men
lay stretched on the ground in the night around and the night was
filled with a slow, sad, susuitous rustle, like the wind fingering the
pines, which was not, however, the sound of ivind in the pines but
the breath of thousands of sleeping men. Jack Burden could read
those words, but how could he be expected to understand them?
They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was
simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the
broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret.
Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and
one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.

Or perhaps he laid aside the journal of Cass Mastern not because
he could not understand, but because he was afraid to understand
for what might be understood there was a reproach to him.

In any case, he laid aside the journal and entered upon one of
the periods of the Great Sleep. He would come home in the eve-
ning, and because he knew that he could not tvork he would go to
bed immediately. He would sleep twelve hours, fourteen hours,
fifteen hours, feeling himself, while asleep, plunge deeper and
deeper into sleep like a diver groping downward into dark water
feeling for something which may be there and which would glitter
if there were any light in the depth, but there isn’t any light. Then
in the morning he would lie in bed, not wanting anything, not even
hungry, hearing the small sounds of the xvorld sneaking and seep-
ing back into the room, under the door, through the glass, through
the cracks in the wall, through the very pores of the wood and
plaster. Then he would think: If I don*t get up I can*t go back to
bed. And he would get up and go out into a 'world which seemed
very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world
of boyhood to which an old man returns.

Then one morning he went out into that world and did not
come back to the room and the pine table. The black books, in
which the journal was written, the ring, the photograph, the packet
of letters were left there, beside the thick stack of manuscript, the
complete works of Jack Burden, which was already beginning to
curl at the edges under the paperweight.

Some weeks later, the landlady of the apartment sent him a big
parcel, collect, containing the stuff he had left on the little pine
Uble. The parcel, unopened, traveled around with him from fur-

201

ni&hed room to furnished room, to the apartment where he lived
for a while with his beautiful wife Lois until the time came w'hen
he just walked out the door and didn't come back; to the other
furnished rooms and hotel rooms, a big squarish parcel with the
brown paper turning yellow and the cords sagging, and the name
Mn Jack Burden fading slowly.

20?

Chapter Five

THAT was the end of my first journey into the enchantments of
aie past, my first job of historical research. It was, as I have indi
cated, not a success. But the second job was a sensational success.
It %vas the “Case of the Upright Judge’' and I had e\ery reason to
congratulate myself on a job well done. It was a perfect research
Job, marred in its technical perfection by only one thing: it meant
something.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black
Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was
what Jack Burden, the student of histor), had grown up to be),
‘There is always something."

And I said, “Maybe not on the Judge."

And he said, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption
and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the
shroud. There is always something."

The black Cadillac made its humming sound through the night
and the tires sang on the slab and the black fields streaked with
mist swept by. Sugar*Boy was hunched over the wheel, which
looked too big for him, and the Boss sat straight up, up there in
the front seat. I could see the black mass of his head against the
tunnel of light down which w^e raced. Then I dozed off.

It was the stopping of the car that woke me up. I realized that
we were back at the Stark place. I crawled out of the car. The Boss
was already out, standing in the yard, just inside the gate in the
starlight; Sugar-Boy was locking the car doors.

When I went into the yard, the Boss said, “Sugar-Boy is going
to sleep on the couch downstairs, but there’s a cot made up for you
upstairs, second door on the left at the head of the stairs. You bet-
ter get some shut-eye, for tomorrow you start digging for w^hat the
Judge dropped.”

“It will be a long dig,” I said.

‘"Look here he said, “if you don’t want to do it you don't have
to. I can always pay somebody else. Or do you want a raise?"

“No, I don’t want a raise," I said.

“I am raising you a hundi'ed a month, whether you want it or
not,"

“Give it to the church," I said. “If I wanted money, I could think
of easier ways to make it than the wa} I make it with you."

“So you work for me because you love me," the Boss said.

“I don’t know why I work for you, but it’s not because I love
you. And not for money."

“No," he said, standing there in the dark, “you don’t know why
you work for me. But I know," he said, and laughed.

Sugar-Boy came into the yard, said good night, and went on to
the house.

“Why?" I asked.

“Boy," he said, “you work for me because I'm the way I am and
you’re the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature
of things."

“That’s a hell of a fine explanation."

“It's not an explanation," he said, and laughed again. “There
ain’t any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is point
at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to see ’em."

“I’m not smart enough," I said.

“You’re smart enough to dig up whatever it is on the Judge.”

“There may not be anything.”

“Nuts," he said. “Go to bed."

“Aren't you coming to bed?"

“No,” he said, and I left him walking across the yard in the dark,
with his head bowed a little, and his hands clasped behind him,
walking casually as though he had come out to stroll through the
park on Sunday afternoon. But it was not afternoon: it was 3:15
A.M.

I lay on the cot upstairs, but I didn’t go right to sleep. I thought
ibout Judge Irwin. About the way he had looked at me that very
night from his tall old head, the way the yellow eyes had glittered
and the lip curled over the strong old yellow teeth as he said, “I'm
dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like
your work?" But that didn’t last, ana I saw him sitting in the long
room in the white house by the sea, leaning over a chessboard,
facing the Scholarly Attorney, and he wasn’t an old man, he was
a young man, and the high aquiline florid face was brooding over
the board. But that didn’t last, and the face leaned toward me
among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the damp gray

204

wintry dawn, and said, “You ought to have led that duck more,
Jack. You got to lead a duck, son. But, son, Fli make a duck hunter
out of you }et.'' And the face smiled. And I wanted to speak out
and demand, “Is there anything, Judge? Will I find anything?”
But die face only smiled, and I went to sleep. Before it could say
anything, I went to sleep in the middle of the smile.

Then it was another day, and I set out to dig up the dead cat,
to excavate the maggot from the cheese, to locate the canker in
the rose, to find the deceased fiiy among the raisins in the rice pud-
ding.

I found it.

But not all at once. You do not find it all at once if you are
hunting for it. It is buried under the sad detritus of time, where,
no doubt, it belongs. And you do not want to find it all at once,
not if you are a student of history. If you found it all at once, there
w^ould be no opportunity to use your technique. But I had an
opportunity to use my technique.

I took the first step tlie next afternoon while I sat in a beer par-
lor in the city, surrounded by a barricade of empty beer bottles.
I lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one and asked
myself the following question: “For what reason, barring Original
Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?”

I answered: “Ambition, love, fear, money.”

I asked: “Is the Judge ambitious?”

I answered: “No. An ambitious man is a man who wants other
people to think he is great. The Judge knows he is great and doesn’t
care what other people think.”

I asked: “What about love?”

I was perfectly sure that the Judge had had his innings, but I was
also perfectly sure that nobody around the Landing had anything
on him in that respect. For if anybody in a small town has anything
on anybody it isn’t long before everybody know^s it.

I asked: “Is the Judge a man to scare easy?”

I answered: “He does not scare easy.”

That left money.

So I asked: “Does the Judge love money?”

“All the money the Judge wants is just enough money to make
the Judge happy.”

I asked: “Was there ever a time when the Judge didn’t have
enough money to make the Judge happy?” But naturally that
wouldn’t be chicken feed.

I lighted another cigarette and turned that question over in my
mind. I did not know the answ^er. Some voice out of my childhood

205

whispered, but I could not catch what it said. I had the vague
sense, rising from a depth of time, and of m\self, of being a child,
of entering the room where the gro^vm people were, of knowing
that they had just diat instant stopped talking because I had come
into the room and was not supposed to know what the) were talk-
ing about. Had I overheard what they had been talking about?
I listened for the voice whispering out of my childhood, but that
voice was a long way off. It could not give me the answer. So I rose
from the table, and left the empty beer bottles and the cigarette
butts, and went out into the street, which still steamed from the
late afternoon shower like a Turkish bath, and where now the
tires of automobiles hissed hotly through the film of moisture on
the asphalt. If we were lucky there might be a breeze off the Gulf
later. If we were lucky.

I got a taxi finally, and said, ‘‘Corner South Fifth and Saint-
Etienne Street,” and fell back on the leather to listen to the tires
hiss through the w’etness like something frying in a skillet. I was
riding to the answer about the Judge. If the man who had the
answer would tell me.

The man was the man who had been the Judge’s close friend for
many a year, his other self, his Damon, his Jonathan, his brother.
That man w^as the man who had been the Scholarly Attorney. He
would know.

I stood on the pavement, in front of the Mexican restaurant,
where the juke box made the jellylike air palpitate, and paid my
taxi and turned to look up at the third floor of the building which
vibrated around the juke box. The signs were still up there, hung
by wire from the little iron balcony, nailed to the wall, wooden
boards painted different colors, some white, some red, some black,
some green, with lettering in contrasted colors. A big sign hanging
from the balcony said: God is not mocked. Another sign said: Now
is the Day of Salvation.

Yeah, I said to myself, he still lives here. He lived there above a
spick restaurant, and nigger children played naked in the next
block among starving cats, and nigger women sat on the steps after
the sun got low and fanned right slow with palm-leaf fans. I reached
for a cigarette as I prepared to enter the doorway of the stairs, but
found I had none. So I went into the restaurant, where the juke
box was grinding to a halt.

To the old woman who stood behind the beer bar squatly like a
keg and whose eyebrows were very thorny and white against the
brown Mexican skin and black rebozo, I said, ^'Cigarrillosf*

'"Que tipoT* she asked.

206

“Lucky/’ I said, and as she laid them before me, I pointed up-
ward, and asked, “The old man, is he upstairs?” But she looked
blank, so I said, ^'Esta arriba el vie]o?^* And felt pleased with my-
self for getting it off.

“Qtiien sabel” she replied. "Tiene y vaf*

So he came and went. Upon the Lord’s business.

Then a \oice said in tolerable English, from the shadows at the
end of the bar, “The old man has gone out.”

“Thank )ou,” I replied to the old man, a jMexican, who was
propped there in a chair. I turned back to the old woman, and
said, “Give me a beer,” and pointed at the spigot.

^Vhile I drank the beer I looked up abo\e the counter and saw
another one of the signs, painted on a big slab of plywood, or
something of the sort, hanging from a nail The background of
the sign w^as bright red, there were blue scrolls of flowers in relief
in the upper corners, the lettering w^as in black, high-lighted in
w’hite. It said: Repent ye; for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
Matt,, Hi, 2,

I pointed to the sign. “De elT* I asked. “The old man’s, huh?”

“Si, sehoT,** the old woman said. Then added irrelevantly, “Es
como un santito'*

“He may be a saint,” I agreed, “but he is also nuts.”

“Nutz?”

“Es loco,’* I explained, “es nuts.”

She said nothing to that, and I continued with the beer until the
old Mexican at the end of the bar suddenly said, “Look, here comes
the old one!”

Turning, I saw the black-clothed figure through the dingy glass
of the door; tlien the door pushed open and he entered, older than
I remembered, the white patches of hair hanging damply from
under the old Panama hat, die steel-rimraed spectacles dangerously
loose on the nose and the pale eyes behind, the shoulders stooped
and drawn together as though pulled by the obscene, disjunctive,
careful weight of the belly, as though it were the heavy tray, or
satchel, worn by some hawker on a street corner. The black coat
did not button across the belly.

He stood there, blinking gravely at me, apparently not recog-
nizing me, for he had come from the last sunshine into the dimness
of the restaurant.

“Good evening, sehor,” the old Mexican said to the Scholarly
Attorney.

“Buenas tardes,” the woman said.

The Scholarly Attorney took off his Panama and turned to the

207

woman, and bowed slightly, with a motion of the head %vhich
stirred suddenly in my mind the pictui'e of tlie long room in the
white house b\ die sea, the picture of a man, the same but different,
younger, the hair not gray, in that room. “Good evening,” he said
to the woman, and then turning to the old Mexican, repeated,
“Good evening, sir.”

The old Mexican pointed at me, and said, “He waits.”

At that the Scholarl) Attorney first, I believe, really observed me.
But he did not recognize me, blinking at me in the dimness. Cer-
tainly he had no reason to expect to find me there.

“Hello,” I said, “don't \ou know me?”

“Yes,” he said, and continued to peer at me. He offered me his
hand, and I took it. It %vas clammy in my grasp.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Do you want the bread?” the old Mexican asked.

The Scholarly Attorney turned to him. “Yes, thank you. If it is
convenient.”

The Mexican rose, went to the end of the counter, and took a
largish brown paper bag full of something, and handed it to the
other.

“Thank you,” the Scholarly Attorney said, ‘‘thank you very much,
sir,”

“De nada/' the Mexican said, bowing.

“I wish you a good evening,” the Scholarly Attorney said, and
bowed to the man, then to the woman, with an inclination of the
head which again twitched the old recollection in me of the room
in the white house by the sea.

Then I followed him out of the restaurant, into the street. Across
the street lay the little park of trampled brown grass, now glistening
with moisture, where the bums sat on benches and the pigeons
cooed softly like an easy conscience and defecated in delicate little
lime-white pinches on the cement around the fountain, I looked at
the pigeons, then at the bulged-open bag, which, I observed, was
full of bread crusts. “Are you going to feed the pigeons?” I asked.

“No, it is for George,” he said, moving toward the doorway that
led above.

“You keeping a dog?”

“No,” he said, and led the way into the vestibule, and up the
wooden stairs.

“What is George, then? A parrot?”

“No,” he said, wheezily, for the stairs were steep, “George is an
unfortunate.”

That meant, I remembered, a bum. An unfortunate is a bum who

208

is fortunate enough to get his foot inside a sofu’s door and stay
there. If he gets a good berth he is promoted from bum to unfor-
tunate. The Scholarly Attorney had, on se\erai occasions before,
taken in unfortunates. One unfortunate had popped the organist
down at the mission where die Scholarly Attorney operated. An-
odier unfortunate had lifted his watch and Phi Beta Kappa key.

So George was another unfortunate. I looked at the bread, and
said, “Well, he must be pretty unfortunate if that’s what he’s got
to eat.”

“He eats some of it,” the Scholarly Attorney said, “but that is
almost accidental. He uses it in his work. But some of it slips down,
I am sure, and that is why he is never hungry. Except for sweets,”
he added.

“How in God’s name does he use bread crusts in his \vork and
the bread crusts slip dowm his throat?”

“Do not take the name of the Lord in vain,” he said. And added,
“George’s work, it’s very clever. And artistic. You will see.”

I saw. We got to the top of the second flight, turned in the nar-
row hall under the cracked skylight, and entered a door. There was
what I took to be George, in one corner of the big, sparsely fur-
nished room, sitting tailor-fashion on a piece of old blanket, with
a couple of big mixing bowls in front of him, and a big piece of
plywood about two feet by four lying on the floor by him.

George looked up when we came in and said, “I ain’t got any
more bread.”

“Here it is,” the Scholarly Attorney said, and took the brown
bag to him.

George emptied the crusts into one of the bowls, then stuck a
piece into his mouth and began to chew, soberly and purposively.
He was a fair-sized, muscular man, with a hell of a strong-looking
neck, and the tendons in his neck worked and pulled slickly while
he chewed. He had yellow hair, almost gone, and a smooth, flat
face with blue eyes. While he chewed he just looked straight ahead
at a spot across the room.

“What does he do that for?” I asked.

“He’s making an angel.”

“Well,” I said. And just then George leaned fonvard over one of
the bowls and let the thoroughly masticated bread drop from his
mouth into the bowl. Then he put another crust into his mouth.

“There is one he has finished,” the Scholarly Attorney sai4, and
pointed at another comer of the room, where another piece of ply-
wood was propped up. I went to examine it. At one end, the figure
of an angel, with wings and flowing drapeary, had been executed in

209

bas-relief in what looked like putty. “That one is just drying/' the
Scholarly Attorney said. “Wlien it gets good and dr}% hell color it.
Then hell shellac it. Then the board will be painted and a motto
put on it."

“Very pretty/' I said.

“He makes statues of angels, too. See," and he went to a kitchen
safe, and opened it, to expose a shelf of dishes and pots and another
with an array of gaudy angels.

I examined the angels. While I did so, the Scholarly Attorney
took a can of soup, a loaf of bread, and some soft butter out of the
safe, put them on the table in the center of the room, and lighted
one of the burners on the two-burner plate in the corner. “Will you
join me in my supper?" he asked.

“No, thanks," I said, and continued to stare at the angels.

“He sometimes sells tliem on the street," he said, pouring out his
soup into a stewpan, “but he can’t bear to sell the best ones."

“Are these the best ones?" I asked.

“Yes," the Scholarly Attorney replied. And added, “They are
pretty good, aren’t they?"

I said, “Yes," for there wasn't anything else to say. Then, looking
at the artist, asked, “Doesn’t he make anything but angels? What
about Kewpie dolls and bulldogs?"

“He makes angels. Because of what happened."

“What happened?"

“His wife," the Scholarly Attorney said, stirring the soup in the
stewpan. “On account of her he makes angels. They were in a circus,
you know.”

“No, I didn't know."

“Yes, they were what you call aerialists. She did the angel act. She
had large white wings, George said."

“White wings," George said through the bread, but it was a
sound like wite whungs, and he fluttered his big hands like wings,
and smiled.

“She fell down a long way with white wings which fluttered as
though she were flying," the Scholarly Attorney continued, explain-
ing patiently,

“And one day the rope broke," I aiG&rmed.

“Something went wTong with the apparatus. It affected George
very deeply."

“How about the way it affected her?"

The old man ignored my wit, and said, “He got so he could not
perform his act."

“What was his act?"

210

**He xvas the man who got hanged.”

“Oh,” J said, and looked at George. That accounted for the big
neck, no doubt. Then, “Did the apparatus go tvrong with him and
choke him or something?”

“No,” the Scholarly Attorney said, “the whole matter simph grew
distasteful to him.”

“Distasteful?” I said.

“Yes, distasteful. Matters came to such a pass that he could not
perform happily in his chosen profession. He dreamed of failing
every time he went to sleep. And he would wet his bed like a child.”

“Falling, falling,” George said through the bread, with a sound
like fatvmg, fawing, but still smiled brightly in the midst of the
chewing.

“One day when he got up on his platform with the loop around
his neck, he could not jump. In fact, he could not move at all He
sank down on the platform and crouched there weeping. They had
to remove him bodily, and bring him down,” the Scholarly Attorney
said. “Then for some time he was completely paralyzed.”

“It sounds,” I said, “like that hanging act must have got pretty
distasteful to him. As you so quaintly put it.”

“He was completely paralyzed,” he repeated, ignoring my wit,
“Through no physical cause— if— ” he paused— “an)/ thing ever comes
to pass from a physical cause. For the physical world, though it
exists and its existence cannot be denied without blasphemy, is
never cause, it is only result, only symptom, it is the clay under the
thumb of the potter and we—” He stopped, the gleam which had
started up fitfully in the pale eyes flickered out, the hands which
had lifted to gesticulate sank. He leaned abo\e the gas plate and
stirred the soup. He resumed, “The trouble was here,” and he laid
a finger to his own forehead. “It was his spirit. Spirit is alwa)s cause
—I tell you—” He stopped, shook his heai and peered at me before
he said sadly, “But you do not understand.”

“I reckon not,” I agreed.

“He recovered from the paralysis,” he said. “But George is not
exactly a well man. He cannot bear high places. He will not look
out the window. He covers his eyes with his hands when I lead Mm
downstairs to go on the street to sell his artistic work. So I take him
down only rarely now. He will not sit on a chair or sleep in a bed.
He must always be on the floor. He does not like to stand. His legs
simply collapse and he begins to cry. It is fortunate he has always
had this artistic bent. It helps him to take his mind off things. And
he prays a good deal. I taught him to pray. That helps. I get up and

211

pray and he says the prayers after me. When he wakes at night with
the dreams and cannot sleep.'’

‘‘Does he still wet the bed?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” the Scholarly Attorney replied gravely.

I looked at George. He was -weeping silently, the tears running
down his smooth, fiat cheeks, but his jawbone was not missing a
beat on the bread. “Look at him,” I said.

The Scholarly Attorney looked at him. “Stupid, stupid,” he mut-
tered fretfully, shaking his head, so that an additional fiake or two
of dandruff floated down to the black serge collar, “stupid of me to
be talking that way with him listening. Stupid— I’m an old man and
I forget—” and clucking and muttering and shaking his head in
that same fretful fashion he poured some soup into a bowl, took a
spoon, and went to George, “Look, look,” he said, leaning, with a
spoon of soup thrust tow^ard George’s face, “good, it’s good soup-
soup— take some soup.”

But the tears continued to flow out of George’s eyes, and he didn’t
open his mouth. But the jaws weren’t working on the bread now.
They were just shut tight.

The old man set the bowl on the floor, and with one hand still
holding the spoon to George’s mouth, with the other he patted
George on the back soothingly, all the while clucking with that dis-
traught, henlike, maternal little noise. All of a sudden he looked
up at me, the spectacles hanging over, and said, peevishly like a
mother, “I just don’t know what to do— he just won’t take soup— he
won’t eat mucia of anything but candy— chocolate candy— I just
don’t know—” His voice ti ailed off.

“Maybe you spoil him,” I said.

He put the spoon back into the bowd, which was on the floor
beside him, then began to fumble in his pockets. He fished out,
finally, a bar of chocolate, somewhat wilted from the heat, and be-
gan to peel back the sticky tinfoil. The last tears were running
down George’s cheeks, w’-hile he watched the process, with his mouth
open in damp and happy expectation. But he did not grab with
his chubby little mitts.

Then the old man broke off a piece of chocolate and placed it
between the expectant lips, and peered into George’s face while
taste buds, no doubt, glowed incandescent in the inner dark and
glands with a tired, sweet, happy sigh released their juices, and
George’s face took on an expression of slow, deep, inward, germinal
bliss, like that of a saint.

fVeli, I almost said to the old man, you said the physical was
never cause, but a chocolate bar is physical and look what ifs cam*

212

ing, for to look at that face you might think it was a bite of Jesus
and not a slug of Hershey's had done it. And how you going to tell
the difference, huh?

But I didn’t say it, for I was looking there at the old man, who
was leaning over with his spectacles hanging and his coat hanging
and his belly hanging from the leaning, and who was holding out
another morsel of chocolate and who was clucking soft, and whose
own face was happy, for that was the word for what his face was,
and as I looked at him I suddenly saw die man in the long w’hite
room by the sea, the same man but a different man, and the rain
of the squall driving in off the sea in the eaid} dark lashed the win-
dow-panes but it was a happy sound and safe because the fire danced
on the hearth and on the window-panes where the rain ran down
to thread the night-black glass with silver, to mix the silver with the
flames caught there, too, and the man leaned and held out something
and said, ‘'Here’s w-hat Daddy brought tonight, but just one bite
now—” and the man broke off a piece and held it out— “just one
bite, for your supper’s near ready now-— but after supper—”

I looked at the old man over there and my guts w-ent warm and
a big lump seemed to dissolve in my chest— as though I had carried
a big lump around in there for so long I had got used to it and
didn’t realize it had been there until suddenly it w-as gone and the
breath came easy. “Father,” I said, “Father—”

The old man looked up at me and said querulously, “What—
what did you say?”

Oh, father, father! but he wasn’t in the long white room by the
sea any more and never would be, for he had w-alked out of it—
w-hy? why? because he wasn’t enough of a man to run his own
house, because he was a fool, because— and he had walked a long
way and up the steps to this room where an old man leaned w-ith
the chocolate in his hand and happiness— if that wras what it w-as—
momentarily on his face. Only it w-asn’t on his face now. There was
just the faint peevishness of an old person who hasn’t quite under-
stood something said.

But I had come a long way, too, from that long white room by
the sea, I had got up off that hearthrug before the fire, where I had
sat with my tin circus wagon and my colored crayons and paper,
listening to the squall-driven rain on the glass, and where Daddy
had leaned to say, “Here’s what Daddy brought tonight,” and I had
come to this room where Jack Burden leaned against the wall with
a cigarette in his mouth. Nobody was leaning over him to give him
chocolate.

So, looking into the old man’s face, answering his querulous que&«

213

don, I said, ‘*Oh, nothing/' For that was W’hat it was. Whatever
had been was nothing now. For w’hate\er was is not now, and w^hat
ever is will not be, and the foam that looks so sun-bright when the
wind is kicking up the breakers lies streaked on the hard sand after
the tide is out and looks like scum off the dishwater.

But there was something: scum left on the hard sand So I said,
"*Yeah, there was something."

*'What?"

“Tell me about Judge Irwin," I said.

He straightened up to face me, blinking palely behind the spec-
tacles as he had blinked at me upon coming from light into the
darkness of the Mexican restaurant below.

“Judge Irwin," I repeated, “you know— your old bosom pal."

“That was another time," he croaked, staring at me, holding the
broken chocolate in his hand.

“Sure, it was," I said, and looking at him now, thought, It sure-
God was. And said, “Sure, but you remember."

“That time is dead," he said.

“Yeah, but you aren't."

“The sinful man I was who reached for vanity and corruption is
dead. If I sin now it is in weakness and not in will. I have put away
foulness."

“Listen," I said, “it's just a simple question. Just one question."

“I have put it away, that time,” he said, and made a pushing ges-
ture with his hands.

“Just one question," I insisted.

He looked at me without speaking.

“Listen," I said, “was Irwin ever broke, did he ever really need
money? Bad?"

He stared at me from a long way off, across the distance, beyond
the bowd of soup on the floor, over the chocolate in his hand
through time. Then he demanded, “Why— why do you want tc
know?"

“To tell the truth," I burst out without meaning to, “I don't
But somebody does, and that somebody pays me the first of the
month. It is Governor Stark."

“Foulness," he said, staring across whatever it was between us,
“foulness.”

“Was Irwin ever broke?” I said.

“Foulness," he affirmed,

“Listen," I said, “I don't reckon Governor Stark— if that is what
all this foulness stuff is about— takes it to the Lord in prayer, but
did you ever stop to think what a mess your fine. God-damned,

214

plug-hatted, church-ping, Horace-quoting friends like Stanton and
Irwin left this state in? At least the Boss does something, but the\ -
they sat on their asses— they—

“All foulness!” the old man uttered, and swept his right arm
wildly before him, tlie hand clutching the chocolate hard enough
to squash it. A part of the chocolate fell to the floor. Baby got it.

“If you meant to imply,” I said, “that politics, including that of
your erstwhile pals, is not exactly like Easter Week in a nunnery,
you are right. But I will beat )ou to the metaphysical draw this
time. Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection
of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the per-
fection of nonbeing. \Vhich is God. For if God is perfection and the
only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is
nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its
thingness. Then where do you get anything to sa)? Then where do
you get off?”

“Foolishness, foolishness,” he said, “foolishness and foulness!”

“I guess you are right,” I said. “It is foolishness. But it is no more
foolish than all that kind of talk. Always words.”

“You speak foulness.”

“No, just words,” I said, “and all words are alike.”

“God is not mocked,” he said, and I saw that his bead was quiver-
ing on his neck.

I stepped quickly toward him, stopping just in front of him,
“Was Irwin ever broke?” I demanded.

He seemed about to say something, his lips opening. Then they
dosed.

“Was he?” I demanded.

“I will not touch the world of foulness again,” he said, his pale
eyes looking steadily upward into my face, “that my hand shall
come away with the stink on my fingers.”

I felt like grabbing him and shaking him till his teeth rattled. I
felt like shaking it out of him. But you can’t grab an old man and
do that. I had gone at the whole thing wrong. I ought to have led
up to it and tried to trick him. I ought to have wheedled him. But
I always got so keyed up and on edge when I got around him that I
couldn’t think of anything but getting away from him. And then
when I had left I always felt worse until I got him out of my mind.
I had muffed it.

That was ail I got. As I was going out, I looked back to see Baby,
who had finished the piece of cliocolate dropped by the old man,
meditatively moving his hand about on the floor to locate any stray

215

crumbs. Then the old man leaned slowly and heavily toward him,
again.

Going down the stairs, I decided that even if I had tried to
wheedle the old man I would probably have learned nothing. It
w^asnh that I had gone at it wTong. It wasn’t that I burst out about
Governor Stark. 'W'hat did he know or care about Governor Stark?
It was that I had asked him about the world of the past, which he
had walked away from. That wwld and ail the w^orid was foulness,
he had said, and he w^as not going to touch it. He tvas not going to
talk about it, and I couldn’t have made him.

But I got one thing. I w^as sure that he had knowm something.
W^ich meant that there was something to know. Well, I would
know it. Sooner or later. So I left the Scholarly Attorney and the
W'orld of the past and returned to the world of the present.

Which was:

An oblong field where white lines mathematically gridded the
turf w^hich was arsenical green under the light from the great bat-
teries of fioodiamps fixed high on the parapet of the massive arena.
Above the field the swollen palpitating tangle of light frayed and
thinned out into hot darkness, but the thirty thousand pairs of eyes
hanging on the inner slopes of the arena did not look up into the
dark but stared down into the pit of light, where men in red silky-
glittering shorts and gold helmets hurled themselves against men in
blue silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets and spilled and tum-
bled on the bright arsenical-green turf like spilled dolls, and a
whistle sliced chillingly through the thick air like that scimitar
through a sofa cushion

Which was:

The band blaring, the roaring like the sea, the screams like
agony, the silence, then one w^oman-scream, silver and soprano,
spangling the silence like the cry of a lost soul, and the roar again
so that the hot air seemed to heave. For out of the shock and tangle
and glitter on the green a red fragment had exploded outward,
flung off from the mass tangentially to spin across the green, turn
and wheel and race, yet slow in the out-of-timeness of the moment,
under the awful responsibility of the roar.

Which was:

A man pounding me on the back and screaming— a man with a
heavy face and coarse dark hair hanging over his forehead— scream-
ing, “That’s my boyl That’s Tom— Tom— Tom! That’s him— and
he’s won— they won’t have time for a touchdown now— he’s won—
his first varsity game and it’s Tom won— it’s my boy!” And the man
pounded me on the back and grappled me to him with both arms,

216

powerful arras, and hugged me like his brother, his true love, his
son, while tears came into his eyes and tears and sweat ran down
the heavy cheeks, and he screamed, “He's my boy— and there's not
any like him— he'll be All American— and Lucy wants me to stop
him playing-my wife wants him to stop~sa\s it's ruining him-
ruining him, hell— he'll be All American— boy, did you see him— fast
—fast— he's a fast son-of-a-bitch! Ain't he, ain’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, and it was true.

He was fast and he was a son-of-a-bitch. At least, if he w'asn’t a
son-of-a-bitch yet, he had shown some very convincing talent in that
line. You couldn't much blame Lucy for wanting to stop the foot-
ball—his name always on the sporting page— the pictures— the Fresh-
man Whiz— the Sophomore Thunderbolt— the cheers— the big fat
hands always slapping his shoulder-Tiny Duiffy's hand on his shoul-
der—yeah, Boss, he's a chip off the old block— the roadhouses— the
thin-legged, tight-breasted little girls squealing, Oh, Tom, oh, Tom
—the bottles and the tourist cabins— the sea-roar of the crowd and al-
ways the single woman-scream spangling the sudden silence like
damnation.

But Lucy did not have a chance. For he was going to be All
American. All American quarterback on anybody's team. If bottle
and bed didn't manage to slow down too soon something inside that
one hundred and eighty pounds of split-second, hair-trigger, Swiss-
watch beautiful mechanism which was Tom Stark, the Boss's boy,
the Sophomore Thunderbolt, Daddy's Darling, who stood that
night in the middle of a hotel room, with a piece of court plaster
across his nose and a cocky grin on his fine, clean, boyish face— for
it was fine and clean and boyish— while all the hands of Papa's pals
pawed at him and beat his shoulders, while Tiny Duffy slapped him
on the shoulder, and Sadie Burke, who sat a little outside the gen-
eral excitement in her own private fog of cigarette smoke and
whisky fumes, a not entirely unambiguous expression on her rid-
dled, handsome face, said, “Yeah, Tom, somebody was telling me
you played a football game tonight.”

But her irony was not the sort of thing Tom Stark would hear or
understand, for he stood there in the midst of his own gleaming
golden private fog of just being Tom Stark, who had played in a
football game.

Until the Boss said, “Now you go on and get to bed, Son. Get
your sleep. Son. Get ready to pour it on 'em next Saturday.” And
he laid his arm across the boy's shoulder, and said, “We're all
mighty proud of you, boy.”

217

And I said to myself; If he gets kis eyes starry with tears again I
am going to puke,

“Go on to bed, Son,'’ the Boss said.

And Tom Stark said, “Sure,” almost out of the side of his mouth,
and went out tlie door.

And I stood there in what was the present.

But there was the past. There was the question. There was the
dead kitty buried in tiie ash heap.

So I stood, later, in the embrasure of a big bay window and
looked out as the last light ceased to gleam from the metallic leaves
of magnolias and the creamy w^ash of the sea beyond dulled in the
thickening dusk. Behind me was a room not very different from
that other long white room giving on the sea—where now, at this
moment perhaps, my mother would be lifting to the taffy-haired
Young Executive that face which was still like a damned expensive
present and which he had damned well better admire. But in the
room behind me, scarcely lighted by the stub of a candle on the
mounted shelf, the furniture was shrouded in white cloth, and the
grandfather’s clock in the corner was as severely mute as grand-
father. But I knew that w'hen I turned around there would also be,
in the midst of the sepulchral sheetings and the out-of-time silence,
a woman kneeling before the cold blackness of the wide fireplace
to put pine cones and bits of light-wood beneath the logs there. She
had said, “No, let me do it. It’s my house, you know, and I ought
to light the fire when I come back like this. You know, a ritual. I
want to. Adam always lets me do it. When we come back.”

For the woman was Anne Stanton, and this was the house of
Governor Stanton, whose face, marmoreal and unperturbed and
high, above black square beard and black frock coat, gazed down in
the candlelight from the massy gold frame above the fireplace,
where his daughter crouched, as though at his feet, rasping a match
to light a fire there. Well, I had been in this room when the Gover-
nor had not been the marmoreal brow in the massy gold frame but
a tall man sitting with his feet on the hearthrug with a little girl, a
child, on a hassock at his feet, leaning her head against his knee and
gazing into the fire while his large man hand toyed deliciously with
the loose, silken hair. But I was here now because Anne Stanton,
no longer a little girl, had said, “Come on out to the Landing, we’re
just going back for Saturday night and Sunday, just to build a fire
and eat something out of a can and sleep under the roof again. It’s
all the time Adam can spare. And he can’t spare that much often
now.” So I had come, carrying my question.

I heard the match rasp, and turned from the sea, which was dark

218

now. The flame had caught the fat of the light-wood and was leap-
ing up and spewing little stars like Christmas sparklers, and the
light danced warmly on i\nne Stanton’s leaning face and then on
her throat and cheek as, still crouching, she looked up at me when
I approached the hearth. Her eyes ivere glittering like the eyes of
a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed in a sud-
den throaty, tingling w^ay. It is the way a woman laughs for happi-
ness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite
or at a joke. A woman only laughs that w^ay a few times in her life.
A woman only laughs tiiat way when something has touclied her
way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just
wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain
brooks. When a w’^oman laughs that way it always does something
to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either.
You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and
beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revela-
tion. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom
from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name
and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that
laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she "would
make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire
Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with bands on
their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man
really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.

So Anne looked up at me with the glittering eyes and laughed
that way while the firelight glowed on her cheek. Then I laughed,
too, looking down at her. She reached up her hand to me, and I
took it and helped her as she rose easy and supple— God, how I hate
a woman who scrambles up off things— and I still held her hand as
she swayed at the instant of reaching her full height. She was very
close to me, with the laughter still on her face— and echoing some-
how deep inside me— and I w^as holding her hand, as I had held it
a long time back, fifteen years back, twenty years back, to help her
up to stand swaying for an instant in front of me before I could put
my arm around her and feel her waist surrender supplely to the cup
of my hand. It had been that way. So now I must have leaned
toward her and for an instant the trace of the laughter was still on
her face, and her head dropped a little back the way a girl’s head
does when she expects you to put your airm around her and doesn’t
care if you do.

But all at once the laughter was gone. It was as though someone
had pulled a shade down in front of her face. I felt as you do when
you pass down a dark street and look up to see a lighted window

219

and in the bright room people talking and singing and laughing
with the firelight splashing and undulating over them and the
sound of the music drifts out to the street w^hile you watclr; and
then a hand, you will never know" w"hose hand, pulls down the
shade. And there you are, outside.

.And there I w'as, outside.

Maybe I should ha\e done it anyway, put my arm around her.
But I didn’t. She had looked up at me and had laughed that w"ay.
But not for me. Because she was happy to be there again in the
room w"hich held the past time-~of which I had been a part, indeed,
but w"as no longer a part— and to be kneeling on the hearth with
the new" heat of the fire laid on her face like a hand.

It had not been meant for me. So I dropped her hand which I
had been holding and stepped back and asked, ‘'Was Judge Irwin
ever broke— bad broke?’’

I asked it quick and sharp, for if you ask something quick and
sharp out of a clear sky you may get an answer you never would
get otherwise. If the person you ask has forgotten the thing, the
quick, sharp question may spear it up from the deep mud, and if
the person has not forgotten but does not want to tell you, the
quick, sharp question may surprise the answer out of him before he
thinks.

But it didn’t work. Either she didn’t know or she wasn’t to be
surprised out of herself. I ought to have guessed that a person like
her— a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self
which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and
patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed
wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us— I ought to have
guessed that that kind of a person would not be surprised into
answering a question she didn’t want to answer. Even if she did
know the answer. But maybe she didn’t.

But she was surprised a little. “What?” she asked.

So I said it again.

She turned her back to me and went to sit on the couch, to light
a cigarette and face me again, looking levelly at me. “Why do you
want to know?” she asked.

I looked right back at her and said, “I don’t want to know. It is
a pal wants to know. He is my best pal. He hands it to me on the‘
first of the month.”

“Oh, Jack—” she cried, and flung her newly lit cigarette across to
the hearth, and stood up from the couch. “Oh, why do you have to
spoil everything! We had that time back there. But you want to
spoil it. We—”

220

*‘We?” I said.

*‘-had something then and you want to spoil it, )ou want to help
him spoil it— that man— he—

“We?” I said again.

“—wants to do something bad—”

“We,” I said, “if we had such a damned fine time why vvas it you
turned me down?”

“That hasn’t anything to do with it. '^Vhat I mean is—”

“'\V%at you mean is that it %vas a fine, beautiful time back then,
but I mean that if it was such a God-damned fine, beautiful time,
why did it turn into this time which is not so damned fine and
beautiful if there wasn’t something in that time %vhich "wasn’t fine
and beautiful? Answer that one.”

“Hush,” she said, “hush, Jack!”

“Yeah, answer me that one. For you certainly aren’t going to say
this time is fine and beautiful. This time came out of that time, and
now you’re near thirty-five years old and you creep out here as a
special treat to yourself and sit in the middle of a lot of sheet-
wrapped, dust-catching furniture in a house with the electricity cut
off, and Adam— he’s got a hell of a life, cutting on people all day till
he can’t stand up, and him tied up in knots himself inside and—’'
“Leave Adam out of it, leave him out—” she said, and thrust her
hands, palms out as though to press me off, but I Tvasn’t in ten feet
of her— “he does something anyway— something— ”

“—and Irwin down there playing with his toys, and my mother up
there with that Theodore, and me—”

“Yes, you,” she said, “you.”

“All right,” I said, “me.”

‘Tes, you. With that man.”

“That man, that man,” I mimicked, “that’s what all the people
round here call him, what that Patton calls him, all those people
vrho got pushed out of the trough. Well, he does something. He
does as much as Adam. More. He’s going to build a medical center
will take care of this state. He’s—”

“I know,” she said, wearily, not looking at me now, and sank
down on the couch, which was co^’-ered by a sheet.

“You know, but you take the same snobbish attitude all the rest
take. You’re like the rest.”

“Ail right,” she said, still not looking at me. “I’m snobbish, Fm
so snobbish I had lunch with him last week.”

Well, if grandfather’s dock in tlie comer hadn’t been stopped al-
ready, that would have stopped it. It stopped me. I heard the flame

221

hum on the logs, gnawing in. Then the hum stopped and there
wasn’t anything.

Then I said, “For Christ’s sake.” And the absorbent silence
sucked up the wwds like blotting paper.

“All right,” she said, “for Christ's sake.”

“My, my,” I said, “but the picture of the daughter of Governor
Stanton at lunch with Governor Stark would certainly throw the
society editor of the Chronicle into a tizzy. Your frock, my dear—
what frock did you ivear? And flowers? Did you drink champagne
cocktails? Did—”

“I drank a Coca Cola, and I ate a cheese sandwich. In the cafe-
teria in the basement of the Capitol.”

“Pardon my curiosity, but—”

“—but you want to know how I got there. I’ll tell you. I went to
see Goiernor Stark about getting state money for the Children’s
Home. And I-”

“Does Adam know?” I asked.

“—and Vm going to get it, too. I’m to prepare a detailed report
and—”

“Does Adam know?”

“It doesn’t matter whether Adam knows or not— and I’m to take
the report back to—”

“I can imagine what Adam would say,” I remarked grimly.

“I guess I can manage my own affairs,” she said with some heat.

“Gee,” I said, and noticed that the blood had mounted a little in
her cheeks, “I thought you and Adam were always just like that.”
And I held my right hand up with forefinger and the next one side
by side.

“We are,” she said, “but I don’t care what—”

“—and you don’t care what /ze— ” and I jerked a thumb toward
the high, unperturbed, marmoreal face which gazed from the massy
gold frame in the shadow— “would say about it either, huh?”

“Oh, Jack—” and she rose from the couch, almost fretful in her
motion, which wasn’t like her— “what makes you talk like that?
Can’t you see? I’m just getting the money for the Home. It’s a piece
of business. Just business.” She jerked her chin up with a look that
was supposed to settle the matter, but succeeded in unsettling me.

“Listen,” I said, and felt myself getting hot under the collar,
“business or not, it’s worth your reputation to be caught running
round with—”

“Running round, running round!” she exclaimed. “Don’t be a
fool, I had lunch with him. On business.”

222

“Business or not, it’s worth your reputation, and-”
“Reputation,” she said. “Fm old enough to take care of my repu-
tation. You just told me I was nearl) senile.”

“I said you were nearly thirty-five,” I said, factually.

“Oh, Jack,” she said, “I am, and I haven’t done anything. I don t
do anything. Not anything worth anything.” She wavered there
and with a hint of distraction lifted her hands to touch her hair.
“Not anything. I don’t want to play bridge all the time. And what
little I do— that Home, the playground thing—”

“There’s always the Junior League,” I said. But she ignored it.
“—that’s not enough. Why didn’t I do something-study some-
thing? Be a doctor, a nurse. I could have been Adam’s assistant. I
could have studied landscape gardening. I could have—”

“You could make lampshades,” I said.

“I could have done something— something— ”

“You could have got married,” I said. “You could have mar-
ried me.”

“Oh, I don’t mean just getting married, I mean—”

“You don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Oh, Jack,” she said, and reached out and took my hand and
hung on to it, “maybe I don’t, I don’t know what’s wrong with me
tonight. When I come out here sometimes— Fm happy when I come,
I truly am, but then—”

She didn’t say any more about it. By this time she had sunk her
head to my chest, and I had given her a few comforting pats on the
shoulder, and she had said in a muffled sort of way that I had to be
her friend, and I had said, “Sure,” and had caught some good whifis
of the way her hair smelled. It smelled just the way it always had,
a good, clean, well-washed, little-girl-ready-for-a-party smell. But she
wasn’t a little girl and this wasn’t a party. It definitely was not a
party. With pink ice cream and devil’s-food cake and horns to blow
and we all played clap-in-and-clap-out and the game in which you
sang about King William being King James’s son and down on this
carpet you must kneel sure as the grass grows in the field and choose
the one you love best.

She stood there for a minute or two with her head on my chest,
and you could have seen daylight between her and her friend, if
there had been any daylight, while her friend gave her the imper*
sonal and therapeutic pats on the shoulder. Then she walked away
from him and stood by the hearth, looking down at the fire, which
was doing fine now and making the room look what is called real
homey.

Then the front door swung open and the wind off the cx>14 sea

223

whipped into the room like a great dog shaking itself and the fire
leaped. It was Adam Stanton coming into that homey atmosphere.
He had an armful of packages, for he had been down into the
I.anding to get our provisions.

'‘Hello,” he said over the packages, and smiled out of that wide,
thin, firm mouth which in repose looked like a clean, well-healed
surgical wound but w^hich when he smiled— if he smiled— surprised
you and made you feel w-arm.

"Look here,” I said quick, ‘ Vay back yonder, any time, was Judge
Irwin ever broke? Bad broke?”

"Why, no— I don’t know—” he began, his face shading.

Anne swung round to look at him, and then sharply at me. I
thought for an instant she was about to say something. But she
didn’t.

"Why, yes!” Adam said, standing there, still hugging the parcels.

I had speared it up from the deep mud.

"Why, yes,” he repeated, with the pleased bright look on his face
which people get when they dredge up any lost thing from the past,
"yes, let me see— I was just a kid— about 1913 or 1914— I remember
father saying something about it to Uncle John or somebody, before
he remembered I was in the room— then the Judge was here and he
and father— I thought they were having a row, their voices got so
high— they were talking about money.”

"Thanks,” I said.

"Welcome,” he said, with a slightly puzzled smile on his face, and
moved to the couch to let the parcels cascade to the safe softness.

"Well,” Anne said, looking at me, “you might at least have the
grace to tell him why you asked the question.”

"Sure,” I said. And I turned to Adam: "I wanted to find out for
Governor Stark.”

"Politics,” he said, and the jaw closed like a trap.

"Yes, politics,” Anne said, smiling a little sourly.

"Well, thank God, I don’t have to mess with ’em,” Adam said.
“Nowadays, anyway.” But he said it almost lightly. Which surprised
me. Then added, "What the hell if Stark knows about die Judge
being broke. It was more than twenty years ago. And there’s no
law against being broke. What the hell.”

"Yeah, what the hell,” Anne said, and looking at me, gave that
not unsour smile.

"And what the hell are you doing?” Adam demanded laughing,
and grabbed her by the arm and shook her. "Standing there when
the grub needs cooking. Get the lead out, Sour-puss, and get going!”
He shoved her toward the couch, where die packages were heaped

224

She bent to scoop up a lot of packages, and he whacked her"
across the backsides, and said, *‘Get going!*' And laughed. And she
laughed, too, with pleasure, and everything was forgotten, for it
^vasn't often that Adam opened up and laughed a lot, and then he
could be free and gay, and you knew you would have a wonderful
time.

We had a wonderful time. While Anne cooked, and I fixed drinks
and set the table, Adam snatched the sheet off the piano (they kept
the thing in tune out there and it wasn’t a bad one even )et) and
beat hell out of it till the house bulged and rocked. He even took
three good highballs before dinner instead of one. Then we ate, and
he beat on the piano some more, playing stuff like “Roses Are
Blooming in Picardy” and '‘Three O'Clock in the Morning,” while
Anne and I danced and cavorted, or he would mush it up and Anne
would hum in my ear and we would sway sweet and slow like young
poplars in the slightest breeze. Then he jumped up from the piano
bench and whistling “Beautiful Lady,” snatched her out of my arms
and swung her wide in a barrel-house waltz while she leaned back
on his arm with her head back and eyes closed for a swoon, and
with right arm outstretched, held delicately the hem of her flutter-
ing skirt.

But Adam was a good dancer, even clowning. It was because he
was a natural, for he never got any practice any more. And never
had taken his share. Not of anything except work. And he could
have had them crawling to him and asking for it. And once in
about five years he would break out in a kind of wild, free, ex-
uberant gaiety like a levee break streaming out to snatch the
trees and brush up by the roots, and you would be the trees and
brush. You and everybody around him. His eyes would gleam wild
and he w^ould gesture wide with an excess of energy bursting from
deep inside. You would think of a great turbine or dynamo making
a million revs a minute and boiling out the power and about to
jump loose from its moorings. When he gestured with those strong,
long, supple white hands, it was a mixture of Svengali and an atom-
busting machine. You expected to see blue sparks. Wlien he got like
that they wouldn't have had the strength to crawd to him and ask
for it. They would just be ready to fall back and roll over where
they were. Only it didn't do them any good.

But that didn’t come often. And didn’t last long. The cold would
settle down and the lid would go on right quick.

Adam didn’t have the power on that night. He was just ready to
smile and laugh and joke and beat the piano and swing his sister
in the barrel-house waltz while the fire leaped on the big hearth and

225

'the high face gazed down from the massy gold frame and the wind
moved in off die sea and in the dark outside clashed the magnolia
leaves.

Not that in that room, with the fire crackling and the music, we
heard the tiny clashing of the magnolia leaves the wind made. I
heard it later, in bed upstairs in the dark, through the open win-
dow, the tiny dry clashing of the leaves, and thought, Were we
happy tonight because we were happy or because once^ a long time
hacky we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light
of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is
cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far
away? 1 turned that notion around in my head and tried to make
a nice tidy little metaphor out of it, but the metaphor wouldn’t
work out, for you have to be the cold, dead, wandering moon, and
you have to have been the sun, too, way back, and how the hell can
you be both the sun and the moon? It was not consistent. It was not
tidy. To hell with it, I thought, listening to the leaves.

Then thought, Well, anyway, I know now Irwin was broke.

I had dug that much up out of the past, and tomorrow I would
leave Burden’s Landing and the past, and go back to the present.
So I went back to the present.

Which was:

Tiny Duffy sitting in a great soft leather chair with his great soft
hams flowing over the leather, and his great soft belly flowing over
his great soft hams, and a long cigarette holder with a burning
cigarette stuck jauntily out from one side of his face (the cigarette
holder was a recent innovation, imitated from a gentleman who was
the most prominent member of the political party to which Tiny
Duffy gave his allegiance) and his great soft face flowing down over
his collar, and a diamond ring on his finger, big as a walnut— for all
of that was Tiny Duffy, who was not credible but true and who had
obviously consulted the cartoons by Harper*s Weekly in the files of
the ’nineties to discover exactly what tiie successful politician should
be, do, and wear.

Which was:

Tiny Duffy saying, “Jesus, and the Boss gonna put six million
bucks in a hospital— six million bucks.” And lying back in the chair,
eyes dreamily on the coffered ceiling, head wreathed in the baby-
blue smoke from the cigarette, murmuring dreamily, “Six million
bucks.”

And Sadie Burke saying, “Yeah, six million bucks, and he ain’t
planning for you to get your fingers on a penny of it.”

*'1 could fix it up for him in the Fourth District MacMurfee still

226

got it sewed up down there. Him and Gummy Larson, But throw
that hospital contract to Gumm} and—”

‘‘And Gummy wwid sell out MacMurfee. Is that it?”

“Well, now-I wouldn’t put it that way. Gummy’d sort of talk
reason into MacMurfee, you might say.”

“And would sort of slip you a slice. Is that it, Tiny?”

“I ain’t talking about me. I’m talking about Gummy. He’d han-
dle IMacMurfee for the Boss.”

“The Boss don’t need anybody to handle MacMurfee. He’ll han-
dle MacMurfee when the time comes and it will be permanent. For
God’s sake, Tiny, you known the Boss as long as y'ou have and you
still don’t know him. Don’t you know he’d rather bust a man than
buy him? Wouldn’t he, Jack?”

“How do I know?” I said. But I did know.

At least, I knew that the Boss was out to bust a man named Judge
Irwin. And I was elected to do the digging.

So I went back to the digging.

But the next day, before I got back at the digging, a call came
from Anne Stanton. “Smarty,” she said, “smarty, you thought you
were so smart!”

I heard her laughing, way off somewhere at the end of the line,
but the tingling came over the wire, and I thought of her face
laughing.

“Yes, smarty! you found out from Adam how^ Ji^dge Irwin was
broke a long time ago, but I’ve found out something too!”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah, smarty! I went to see old Cousin Mathilda, who knows
everything about everybody for a hundred years back. I just got to
talking about Judge Irwin and she began to talk. You just mention
something and it is like putting a nickel in a music box. Yes, Judge
Irwin was broke, or near it, then, but— and the joke’s on you,
Jackie-boy, it’s on you, smarty-boy! And on your Boss!” And there
was the laughter again, coming from far away, coming out of the
little black tube in my hand.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Then he got married!” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Who are we talking about, smarty? Judge Irwin got married.”

“Sure, he was married. Everybody knew he was married, but what
the hell has that—”

“He married money. Cousin Mathilde says so, and she knows
everything. He was broke but he married money. Now, smarty, put
that in your pipe and smoke it!”

“Thanks/’ I said. But before it was out of my mouth, I heard a
clicking sound and she had hung up.

I lighted a cigarette and leaned back in the swivel chair, and
swung my feet up to the desk. Sure, everybody knew, or had known,
that Judge Irwin was married. Judge Irwdn, in fact, had been mar-
ried twice. The first wnman, the woman he was married to w^hen
I was a little boy, had been thrown from a horse and couldn’t do
more than lie up in bed and stare at the ceiling or, on her good
days, out the window. But she had died when I was just a kid, and
I scarcely remembered her. But you almost forgot the other wife,
too. She was from far away— I tried to remember how she looked. I
had seen her several times, all right. But a kid of fifteen or so
doesn’t pay much attention to a grown woman. I called up an
image of a dark, thin woman, with big dark eyes, wearing a long
white dress and carrying a white parasol. Maybe it wasn’t the right
image, at all. Maybe it was somebody else who had been married
to Judge Irwin, and had come to Burden’s Landing, and had re-
ceived all the curious, smiling ladies in Judge Irwin’s long white
house, and had been aware of the eyes and the sudden silence for
attention and then the new sibilance as she walked down the aisle
in St. Matthew’s just before the services began, and had fallen sick
and had lived with a Negro nurse in an upstairs room for so long
that people forgot about her very existence and were surprised
when the funeral came to remind them of the fact that she had
existed. But after the funeral there was nothing to remind them,
for the body had gone back to whatever place it was she came from,
and not even a chiseled name was left in the Irwin plot in the St.
Matthew’s graveyard, under the oaks and the sad poetic festoons of
Spanish moss, which were garlanded on the boughs as though to
prepare for the festivities of ghosts.

The Judge had had bad luck with his wives, and people felt
sorry for him. Both of them sickly for a long time and then had
died on his hands. He got a lot of sympathy for that.

But this second wife, I was told, was rich. That explained why
the face I called up was not pretty— not the kind of face you would
expect to find on Judge Irwin’s wife— but a sallowish, thin face, not
even young, with only the big dark eyes to recommend it.

So she had been ridi, and that disposed of my notion that back
in 1913 or 1914 the Judge had been broke and had stepped over the
line. And that made Anne Stanton happy. Happy because now
Adam hadn’t played, even unwittingly, stool pigeon to the Boss.
Well, if it made her happy, it made me happy too, I reckoned. And
maybe she was happy to think, too, that Judge Irwin was innocent

228

Well, that would have made me happy too. Ail I was doing was
trying to prove Judge Irwin innocent. I would be able, sooner or
later, to go to the Boss and say, “No sale. Boss. He is washed in the
Blood.’^

“The son-of-a-bitch is washed in whitewash/' the Boss would sa\.
But he’d have to take my word. For he knew I was thorough. I was
a very thorough and well-trained research student. And truth was
what I sought, without fear or favor. And let the chips fly.

Amway, I could cross 1913 oS the ticket. Anne Stanton had set-
tled that.

Or had she?

When you are looking for the lost Tvill in the old mansion, you
tap, inch by inch, along the beautiful mahogany w^ainscoting, or
along the massive stonework of the cellarage, and listen for the hol-
low sound. Then upon hearing it, you seek the secret button or
insert the crowbar. I had tapped and had heard something hollow.
Judge Irwin had been broke. “But, oh, no,” Anne Stanton had said,
“there is no secret hiding place there, that's just 'where the dumb-
waiter goes.”

But I tapped again. Just to listen to that hollow sound, even if it
was just the place where the dumb-waiter went.

I asked myself: If a man needs money, where does he get it? And
the answer is easy: He borrows it. And if he borrows it, he has to
give security. What would Judge Irwin have given as security? Most
likely his house in Burden’s Landing or his plantation up the river.

If it was big dough he needed, it would be the plantation. So I
got in ray car and headed up the river for Mortonville, which is the
county seat of La Salle County, a big chunk of which is the old
Irwin plantation where the cotton grows white as -whipped cream
and the happy darkies sing all day, like A1 Jolson.

In the courthouse at Mortonville, I got hold of the abstract on
the Irwin place. There it was, from the eighteenth-century Spanish
grant to the present moment. And in 1907, there was the entry:
Mortgage^ Montague Irwin to Mortonville Mercantile Bank, $^2,000,
due January i, i^xo. Late in January, igio, a chunk had been paid,
about $ IS, 000 and the mortgage redrawn. By the middle of 1912,
interest payments were being passed. In March, 1914, foreclosure
proceedings had been instituted. But the Judge had been sa\’'ed by
the bell. In early May there was an entry for the satisfaction of the
mortgage in full. No further entries were on the abstract,

I had tapped again, and there was the hollow sound. When a
man is broke there is always a hollow sound, like the tomb.

But he had married a rich wife,

229

But was she rich?

I had only the word of old Cousin Mathilde for that. And the
evidence of Mrs. Irwin’s sallow face. I decided to put in the crow-
bar.

I -would check the date of marriage with the dates on the abstract.
That might tell something. But whatever that said, I -would put in
the crowbar.

I knew nothing about Mrs. Ir^vin, not the date of her marriage,
not even her name or where she came from. But that was easy. An
hour in the newspaper files of the public library back in the city,
looking at the society pages, -which after more than twenty years
were yellow and crumbling and somewhat less than gay or grand,
and I came out again into the light of day with my collar wilted
and my hands begrimed but with the words scribbled on the back
of an envelope in my inside coat pocket: Mabel Carruthers, only
child of Le Moyne Carruthers, Savannah, Georgia, Married, Janu-
ary 12, 1^14.

The date of marriage didn’t tell me much. True, the foreclosure
proceedings had been instituted after the marriage, but that didn’t
prove that Mabel wasn’t rich: it might have taken the Judge all the
honeymoon to work around to the gross subject of the long green.
The Judge would not have been crude. So she might have been
rich as goose grease. But nevertheless, that night I was on the train
for Savannah.

Twenty-five years is not a long time in the eye of God, but it
damned near takes the eye of God to spy much about the inside
story of even a leading citizen like Le Moyne Carruthers who has
been dead twenty-five years- I didn’t have the eye of God. I had to
poke and pry and work newspaper files and pump the broken-down
old bird who was city editor and cultivate the society of a fellow I
had once known who was now a local hot-shot in the insurance
game and get to know his friends. I ate roast duck stuffed with
oysters and yams and that wonderful curry they make in Savannah,
which tastes good even to a man like me who loathes food, and
drank rye whisky, and walked down those beautiful streets General
Oglethorpe laid out, and stared at the beautiful severe fronts of the
houses, which were more severe than ever now, for the last leaves
were oflE the arching trees of the streets and it was the season when
the wind blows great chunks of gray sky in off the Atlantic which
come dragging in so low their bellies brush the masts and chimney
pots, like gravid sows crossing a stubble field.

I saw the Le Moyne Carruthers house. The old boy must have
been rich, all right. And when he died in 1904 he had been rich,

230

according to the probate of the will. But it was nine yeai's between
1904 and 1913, and a lot can happen. Mabel Carruthers had lived
high. That was the stoiy. But tliey all said she could afford it. And,
according to what I could pick up, there was no reason to believe
that the uncle in New York, who was tlie executor of the will,
hadn’t kno’ivn his business about handling Mabel’s im estmeiits.

It looked absolutely level. But there is one thing )ou must never
forget: the judgment docket book in the courthouse.

I did not forget it. And there I found the name of Mabel Car-
ruthers. People had had some trouble getting money out of Mabel.
But this didn’t prove anything. Lots of rich girls are so rich they are
just above paying bills and you have to pinch them to make them
disgorge. But I noticed one thing. Mabel didn’t get the bad habit
until 1911. In other words, she had paid her bills all right for the
first seven years she had had her money. Now, I argued, if this ami-
able failing had been merely the result of temperament and not of
necessity, why did it come on her all at once? It had come on her
all at once, and in a flock. Not that it was the comer grocer by him-
self. He had some fast company, for Mabel didn’t like to pay Le
Clerc in New York for a diamond pendant, and didn’t like to pay
her dressmaker, and didn’t like to pay a local vintner for some
pretty impressive stuff. Mabel had lived high, all right.

The last judgment was to the Seaboard Bank for a loan, amount-
ing to $750. Small change for Mabel. Now there w^as no Seaboard
Bank in Savannah. The telephone directory told me that. But an
old fellow sitting in a split-bottom chair in the courthouse told me
that the Seaboard Bank had been bought out by the Georgia
Fidelity back about 1920. Down at the Georgia Fidelity, they told
me. Yes, back in 1920. Who was president of the Seaboard then?
Why, just a minute, and they’d find out. Mr. Percy Poindexter had
been. Was he in Savannah? Well, they couldn’t say for sure, times
changed so fast. But Mr. Pettis would know, Mr. Charles Pettis,
who was his son-in-law. Oh, you are welcome, sir. Quite welcome.

Mr. Percy Poindexter was not in Savannah now, and scarcely in
this world, for after the exhalation of each breath you w^aited and
waited for that delicate little contraption of matchwood and trans-
parent parchment and filigree of blue veins to gather strength
enough for one more effort. Mr. Poindexter reclined in his wheel
chair, his transparent hands lying on the wine-colored silk of his
dressing gown, his pale-blue eyes fixed on the metaphysical distance,
and breathed each breath, saying, *Tes, young man— you have lied
to me, of course— but I do not care— care why you want to know— it
could not matter now— not to anyone— for they are all dead— Le

231

Moyne Carruthers is dead— he was my friend— m) dearest fiiend—
but that was very long ago and I do not clearly recollect his face—
and his daughter IMabel— I did what I could for her— even after her
financial reverse she would ha\e had enough to live decently— even
in modest luxur}— but no, she threw money away— always more— I
loaned her a great deal at the bank— some of it I shamed her into
paying— tw"o or three notes I paid myself— for the memory of Le
Moyne— and sent them canceled to her to shame her to discretion—
but no— but she would come back to me without shame and stare at
me out of her big eyes— they were daik and sullen and hot-looking
like a fever— and would say, I want money— and at last I brought a
note to judgment— to shame her— to frighten her— for her owm good
—for she spent money like water— she spent it in a fever to give balls
and parties— to adorn herself, and she was plain— to get a husband—
but men gave her no mind beyond courtesy— but she got a husband
—from the West somewhere, a wealthy man, they said— he married
her quickly and took her away— she died and w^as brought back here
—the burial— it was a bad day and few came— not even in respect to
Le Moyne— not even his friends, some of them— dead twelve years
and they had forgotten him— people forget—’’

The breath gave out, and for a long moment I thought there
would not be any more. But some more came, and he said, “But—
that— doesn’t matter— either.”

I thanked him, and shook his hand, which was like cold w^ax and
left a chill in my palm, and went out and got into my rented car
and drove back to the city, where I got a dri^, not to celebrate but
to take the ice out of my marrow, which not the weather but the
old man had put there.

I had found out that Mabel Carruthers had been broke, but had
married a rich man from the West. Or rather what in Savannah
they called “the West.” Well, that was a joke. No doubt the rich
man from the West had married her for her money, too. There
must have been some gay times as the truth emerged. I left Savan-
nah the next day, but not before I had gone out to the cemetery to
look at the Carruthers vault, where moss encroached upon the great
name and the angel lacked one arm. But that didn’t matter, for ail
the Carrutherses were inside now.

I had knocked and the sound had been very, very hollow. I sunk
the crowbar in deeper. Judge Irwin had not paid off his mortgage
in 1914 with his wife’s money. What had he been doing in 1914 to
get money? He had been running a plantation, and he had been,
under (governor Stanton, the state’s Attorney General. Well, you
don’t clear 144,000 a season off a cotton plantation (it was that

232

amount he had paid, for the Si 2,000 he had paid in 1910 had come
from a mortgage on the house in the Landing, I discovered, which
he cleared at the same time as the plantation). And his salary as
Attorney General had been $3,400. You don't get rich being an At-
torney General in a Southern state. At least, )ou aren’t supposed to.

But in March of 1915 the Judge had a good job, a very good job.
He resigned as Attorney General to become counsel and vice-presi-
dent for the American Electric Power Company, at a ver\ good
figure, §20,000 a }ear. There was no reason w'hy the\ shouldn’t have
hired Judge Irwin, who was a good lawyer. But \ou could have
hired a lot of good lawyers for a lot less than §20,000 a year. But a
job in 1915 doesn’t pay oQ the bailiff in 1914. When I knocked, it
still sounded hollow.

So I took my one plunge in the stock market. One share of com-
mon stock of the American Electric Power Company, and it was
cheap as dirt in the middle of the Depression. But it turned out to
be a very expensive piece of paper. For a lot of people.

I was a coupon-clipper now, and I wanted to know how they were
going to take care of my investment. So I took advantage of the
stockholder’s right. I went down to look at the stock records of the
American Electric Power Company, From the literal dust of time,
I dug up certain facts: In May, 1914, Montague M. Iiwin had sold
five hundred shares of common stock, at par, to Wilbur Satterfield
and Alex Cantor, who were, I was to discover later, officials of the
company. That meant that Irwin had plenty in his pocket in late
May to pay off the mortgages and have some change left over. But
when had he got hold of the stock? That w’as easy. In March, 1914,
the company had been reorganized and a big chunk of new stock
issued. Irwin’s stock was part of the new chunk. The boys had
passed it to Irwin (or had he bought it?) and some of the other boys
had bought it back. (Irwin must have kicked himself about selling
it, for it began to climb shortly and kept on climbing for quite a
spell. Had Messrs. Satterfield and Cantor taken Irwin? They were
old hands, on the inside. But Irwin had had to sell, and quick.
There was the mortgage.)

Irwin had had the stock, and had sold it to Messrs. Satterfield and
Cantor. So far, so good. But how had Irwin got die stock? Had they
just given it to him out of the blue? Not likely. But why do people
give you great big chunks of nice new stock issues wth gold seals?
The answer is simple: Because you are nice to them.

The job, then, was to find out if Judge Irwin— then state's Attor-
ney General— had been nice to the American Electric Powder Com-
pany, And that meant a long dig. With exactlv nothing in the bot-

tom of the hole. For the entire period when Judge Invin was Attor-
ney General, the -ilmerican Electric Power Company had been an
exemplary citizen. It had looked even man in the e\e and had
asked no fators. There tvas nothing in the hole.

Well, how had Judge Irwin spent his time as Attorney General?

The usual odds and ends, it developed. But there had almost
been a case. The suit to recover royalties from the Southern Belle
Fuel Company, which had operated, under lease, the state coal
lands. There had been some hullabaloo about it, a little stir in the
Legislature, and some editorials, and some speechmaking, but it
was only the ghost of a "whisper now. I was probably the only per-
son in the state who knew about it now.

Unless Judge Irwin knew, and "woke up in the night and lay in
the dark.

It was all about the interpretation of a royalty contract between
the state and the company. It was a very ambiguous contract. Per-
haps it had been designed to be that way. In any case, by one read-
ing, the state stood to gain about $150,000 in back royalties and
God knew how much before the end of the contract period. But it
was a very ambiguous contract. It was so ambiguous that, just as
the shooting was about to start, the Attorney General decided that
there was no case. “We feel, however,” he said in his public state-
ment, “that it is most reprehensible that those responsible for this
agreement should have been so lax in their protection of the public
interest as to accept the figures of this contract by which the state
has sold for a song one of her richest assets. But we also feel that,
since the contract exists and is susceptible of only one reasonable
interpretation, this state, which wishes to encourage industry and
enterprise within her borders, cannot do otherwise than bow to an
arrangement which, though obviously unjust in its working, is bind-
ing in the law. And we must remember, even in circumstances such
as this, that it is by law that justice herself lives.”

I read that in the old Ttmes-Chronicle of February 26, 1914,
which was dated a couple of weeks before the foreclosure proceed-
ings were instituted against the Irwin plantation. And about three
weeks before the final reorganization of the American Electric and
the issue of the new stock. The relationship was a relationship in
time.

But is any relationship a relationship in time and only in time? I
eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge.
The flower-in-the-crannied-wall theory. We have to accept it be-
cause so often our teeth are on edge from persimmons we didn't eat.
So I plucked the flower out of its cranny and discoyered an astoi>

234

ishing botanical fact. 1 discovered that its delicate little root, with
many loops and kinks, ran ail the way to New- York Cit)', wiiere it
tapped the lush dung heap called the Madison Corporation. The
floxv^er in the cranny xvas the Southern Belle Fuel Company. So I
plucked another little flower called the American Electric Power
Company, and discovered that its delicate little root tapped the
same dung heap.

I was not prepared to say that I knew what God and man are, but
I was getting ready to make a shrewd guess about a particular man.
But just a guess.

It was just a guess for a long time. For I had reached the stage in
my problem where there was nothing to do but pray. That stage
always comes. You do all you can, and you pray till you can’t pray,
and then you go to sleep and hope to see it ail in die dream, by
grace. '‘Kubla Khan,” the benzine ring, Caedmon’s song—they all
came in the dream.

It came to me. Just as I fell asleep one night. It was only a name.
A funny name. Mortimer L. Littlepaugh. The name drifted around
inside my head, and I thought how funny it was and went to sleep.
But when I woke up in the morning, my first thought was: Mot-
timer L. Littlepaugh. Then walking down the street that day, I
bought a newspaper and as I looked, at it I saw the name Mortimer
L. Littlepaugh, Only it was not in the newspaper I had just bought.
It was on a yellow, crumbling, old-cheese-smeiling sheet, which I
saw, suddenly, in my mind’s eye. Mortimer L, Littlepaugh's Death
Accident^ Coroners Jury Decides, That xvas it. Then, wavering
slowly up, like a chunk of waterlogged wood stirred loose from the
depth, the phrase came: Counsel for the American Electric Power
Company, That was it.

I went back to the files, and found the story. Mortimer had fallen
out of a hotel window, or rather, off the little iron-railed balcony
outside the window. He had fallen from the fifth floor, and that was
the end of Mortimer. At the inquest his sister, who lived with him,
said he had recently been in ill health and had complained of fits
of dizziness. There had been some theory of suicide, for Mortimer’s
affairs were in a tangled condition, it developed, and the railing was
high for an accidental fall. And there was a little mystery about a
letter a bellhop swore Mortimer had given him the evening before
his death, with a four-bit tip and instructions to go out and mail it
immediately. The bellhop swore it had been addressed to Miss
Littlepaugh. Miss Littlepaugh swore that she had received no letter.
Well, Mortimer had been dizzy.

He had also been a lawyer for the American Electric. He had, I

235

learned, been let out not long before Invin came in. It did not
sound too promising, but one more dead end wouldn’t matter.
There had been plenty of dead ends in the six or eight months I
had been on the job.

But this was not a dead end. There was !Miss Lily Mae Little-
paugh, whom, after five weeks, I tracked down to a dark, foul, fox-
smelling lair in a rooming house on the edge of the slums, in IMem-
phis. She was a gaunt old w^oman, wearing black spotted and stained
with old food, almost past the pretense of gentility, blinking slowly
at me from weak red e) es set in the age-crusted face, sitting there in
the near-dark room, exuding her old-fox smell, which mixed with
the smell of oriental incense and candle wax. There were holy pic-
tures on the walls on every^ spare space, and in one corner of the
room, on a little table, a sort of shrine, with a curtain of faded wine-
colored velvet hanging above it, and inside not a Madonna or cruci-
fix as you would expect from the other pictures, but a big image
made of felt and mounted on a board which I at first took to be a
sunflower pincushion swollen to an impractical size, but then real-
ized was an image of the sun and its rays, The Life-Giver. And in
that room. Before it, on the table, a candle burned fatly as though
fed not merely from the wax but from the substance of the greasy
air.

In the middle of the room was a table with a wine-colored velvet
cover, and on the table a dish of poisonously colored hard randies,
a glass of water, and a couple of long narrow horns or trumpets
apparently made of pewter. I sat well back from the table. On the
other side. Miss Littlepaugh studied me from the red eyes, then
said, in a voice surprisingly strong, “Shall we begin?”

She continued to study me, then said, half as though to herself,
“If Mrs. Dalzell sent you, I reckon—”

“She sent me,” She had sent me. It had cost me twenty-five dol-
lars.

“I reckon it’s all right.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

She got up and went to the candle on the little table, watching
me all the while as though, in the last flicker of the light before she
blew it out, I might turn out to be distinctly not all right. Then
she blew out the candle and made her way back to her chair.

After that, there were wheezings and moanings for a bit, the
chink of metal which 1 took to be from one of the trumpets, some
conversation, not very enlightening or edifying, from Princess Spot-
ted Deer, who was Miss Littiepaugh’s control, and some even more
unenlightening remarks, given in a husky guttural, from somebody

236

on the Other Side who claimed to be named Jimmy and to have
been a friend of my youth. Meanwhile, tlie radiator against the wall
at m} back thumped and churned, and I inhaled the pitch darkness
and sweated. Jimmy was saving that I going to take a trip.

I leaned forward in the dark and said, “Ask for Afortimer. I want
to ask Mortimer a quesnon.'’

One of tlie trumpets chinked softly again, and the Princess made
a remark I didn’t eaten.

“It’s Mortimer L. I wa^xt,” I said.

There was some huskiness in the trumpet, \er\ indistinct.

“He is trying to come through,” Miss Littlepaugh’s voice said,
“but tlie vibrations are bad.”

“I w^ant to ask him a question,” I said. “Get Mortimer. You know,
Mortimer L. The L. is for Lonzo.”

The vibrations w^ere still bad.

“I want to ask him about the suicide.”

The vibrations must have been very bad, for there w^asn’t a sound
now.

“Get Mortimer,” I said. “I want to ask him about the insurance.
I want to ask him about the last letter he wrote.”

The vibrations must have been terrific, for a trumpet banged on
the table and bounced off to the floor, and there was a racket and
rustling across the table, and when the electric light came suddenly
on, there was Miss Littlepaugh standing by the door with her hand
on the switch, staring at me out of the red eyes, while her breath
hissed quite audibly over old teeth.

“You lied,” she said, “you lied to me!”

“No, I didn’t lie to you,” I said, “My name is Jack Burden, and
Mrs. Dalzell sent me.”

“She’s a fool,” she hissed, “a fool to send you— you— ”

“She thought I was all right. And she wasn’t a fool to want
twenty-five dollars.”

I took out my wallet, removed some bills, and held them in my
hand. “I may not be all right,” I said, “but this stuff always is.”

“What do you want?” she demanded, her eyes snatching from
my face to the green sheaf and back to my face.

“What I said,” I said. “I want to talk to Mortimer Lonzo Little^
paugh. If you can get him on the wire.”

“What do you want from him?”

“What I said I wanted. I want to ask him about the suicide.”

“It was an accident,” she said dully.

I detached a bill and held it up, “See that,” I said. “That is one

237

hundred bucks.’* I laid it on the table, at tlie end toward her. ‘‘Look
at it good,” I said. “It is yours. Pick it up.”

She looked fearfully at the bill,

I held up two more bills. “Two more,” I said, “just like it. Three
hundred dollars. If you could put me in touch with Mortimer, the
money would be }ours.”

“The vibrations,” she muttered, “sometimes the vibrations—”

“Yeah,” I said, “the vibrations. But a hundred bucks will do a lot
for the vibrations. Pick up that bill. It is yours.”

“No,” she said quickly and huskily, “no.”

I took one of the two bills in my hand and laid it on top of the
other one on the table.

“Pick it up,” I said, “and to hell -with the vibrations. Don’t you
like money? Don’t )ou need money? When did you get a square
meal? Pick it up and start talking.”

“No,” she whispered, cringing back against the wall, with a hand
now on the doorknob as though she might flee, staring at the
money. Then she stared at me, thrusting her head out suddenly,
saying, “I know—I know you— you’re trying to trick me— you’re from
the insurance companyl”

“Wrong number,” I said. “But I know about Mortimer’s insur-
ance policy. Suicide clause. That’s why you—”

“He—” she hissed, and her gaunt face gathered itself into a con-
tortion which might have been grief, or rage, or despair, you
couldn’t tell for sui'e— “he borrowed on his insurance— nearly all—
and didn’t tell me— he— ”

“So you lied for almost nothing,” I said. “You collected the insur*
ance, all right, but there wasn’t much left to collect.”

“No,” she said, “there wasn’t. He left me— that vray— he didn’t
tell me— he left me with nothing— and this— this— ” She looked about
the room, the broken furniture, the foulness, and seemed to shudder
and shrink from it as though she had just entered and perceived it.
“This-” she said, “this.”

“Three hundred would help,” I said, and nodded toward the two
bills on the velvet.

“This— this— ” she said, “he left me— he was a coward— oh, it was
easy for him— easy— all he had to do was—”

“X¥as to jump,” I finished.

That quieted her. She looked at me heavily for a long moment,
^hen said, “He didn’t jump.”

“My dear Miss Littlepaugh,” I said in the tone usually described
as “not unkindly,” “why don’t you admit it? Your brother has been
dead a long time and it will do him no harm. The insurance com-

238

pany has forgotten about tlie business. Nobodx would blame %ou
for l)ing— you had to live. And—’’

“It wasn t the money, she said. “It Tvas the disgrace. I wanted
him buried fiom the church. I wanted — ” She stopped suddenly.

‘ Ah, I said, and glanced at the holy pictures around the wall.

“I was a believer tlien, she said, paused, coiTected herself, “I be-
lie'^e now in God, but it is different.*’

Yes, }es, I said soothingly, and looked at the one trumpet left
on the table. And, of course, it is stupid to think of it as a disgrace,
Wlien your brother did it—”

“It was an accident,” she said.

“Now, Miss Littlepaugh, you just admitted the fact a second
ago/’

“It was an accident’ she repeated, drawing back into herself.

“No, I said, he did it, but it 'was not his fault. He was driven to
it.” I w^atched her face. He had given years to that company, then
they threw him out. To make room for a man who had done a
wicked thing. Who drove your brother to his death. Isn’t that truer”
I got up, and took a step toward her. “Isn’t that true?”

She looked at me steadily, then broke. “He did! He drove him tc
it, he killed him, he was hired because it was a bribe-my brother
knew that— he told them he knew it— but they threw him out— they
said he couldn’t prove it, and threw him out—”

“Could he prove it?” I said.

“Oh, he knew, all right. He knew all about that coal business-he
knew long before but he didn’t know what they were going to do to
him— they treated him fine then and knew ail the time they would
throw him out— but he went to the Governor and said—”

“What,” I demanded, “what did you say?” And stepped toward
her.

“To the Governor, he—”

“Who?”

“To Governor Stanton, and the Governor wouldn’t listen, he
just—”

I grasped the old woman’s arm and held it tight. “Listen,” I said,
“you are telling me that your brother went to Governor Stanton
and told him?”

“Yes, and Governor Stanton wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t listen.
He told him he couldn’t prove anything, he wouldn't investigate,
and that—”

“Are you lying?” I demanded, and shook the matchwood arm.

“It’s true, true to God!” she exclaimed quivering in my grasp.
“And that killed my brother. The Governor killed him. He went to

239

the hotel and TOOte the letter to me and told me, and that night—’'

“The letter,” I said, “what happened to the letter?”

“—that night— just before day— but waiting all night in that room
--and just before day—”

*The letter,” I demanded, “what happened to the letter?”

I shook her again, as she repeated, 'whispering, before

day—” But she came up out of the depth of the thought she w^as in,
looked at me, and answered, “I have it.”

I released my grip on her arm, thrust a bill into her clammy
hand, and crushed her fingers upon it. “It’s a hundred dollars,” I
said. “Give me the letter, and you can have the rest— three hundred
dollars!”

“No,” she said, “no, you want to get rid of the letter. Because it
tells the truth. You’re that man’s friend.” She stared into my face,
prying into it, blinking, like an old person prying with feeble
fingers to open a box. She gave up, and asked helplessly, “Are you
his friend?”

“If he could see me right now,” I said, “I don’t imagine he would
think so.”

“You aren’t his friend?”

“No,” I said. She looked at me dubiously. “No,” I said, “I’m not
his friend. Give me the letter. If it is ever used it will be used
against him. I swear it.”

“I’m afraid,” she said, but I could feel her fingers under my arm
slowly working the bill I had thrust there,

“Don’t be afraid of the insurance company. That was long back.”

“When I went to the Governor—” she began.

“Did you go to the Governor, too?”

“After it happened— after everything— I wanted to hurt that man
—I went to the Governor—”

“My God,” I said.

“-and asked him to punish him— because he had taken a bribe—
because he had killed my brother— but he said I had no proof, that
that man was his friend and I had no proof.”

“The letter, did you show him the letter?”

“Yes, I had the letter.”

“Did you show Governor Stanton the letter?”

“Yes— yes— and he stood there and said, ‘Miss Littlepaugh, you
have sworn that you did not receive that letter, you have sworn to
a lie, and that is perjury and the penalty for perjury is severe, and
if that letter becomes known you will be prosecuted to the full ex-
tent of the law.’ ”

“What did you do?” I asked.

240

The head, which was nothing but gray hair and yellow skin stuck
on bone, and old memories, wavered on its thin stalk of a neck,
lightly and dryly as though touclted by a breeze. “Do,” she echoed,
“do,” shaking her head. “I was a poor woman, alone. Mj brother,
he had gone away. What could I do?”

“You kept the letter,” I afiSrmed, and she nodded.

“Get it,” I said, “get it. Nobody will bother you now. I stvear it.”

She got it. She clawed into the mass of yellow and acid-smelling
papers and old ribbons and crumpled cloth in a tin trunk in the
corner, while I leaned over her and fretted at the palsied incom-
petence of the fingers. Then she had it.

I snatched the envelope from her hand and shook the paper out.
It was a sheet of hotel stationery— the Hotel Moncastello— dated
August 3, 1915. It read:

Dear Sister:

I have been this afternoon to see Governor Stanton and told him how I
have been thrown out of my job like a dog after all these years because
that man Irwin was bribed to let up on the suit against the Southern Belle
Fuel people and how he now has my place at a salary they never paid
me and I gave them my heart’s blood all these years. And they call him
vice-president, too. They lied to me and they cheated me and they make
him vice-president for taking a bribe. But Governor Stanton would not
listen to me. He asked me for my proof and I told him what Mr. Satter-
field told me months ago how the case had been fixed and how in our
company they’d take care of Irwin. Now Satterfield denies it. He denies
he ever told me, and looks me in the eye. So I have no proof, and Gover-
nor Stanton will not investigate.

I can do no more. I went as you know to the people who are against
Governor Stanton in politics but they would not listen to me. Because
that blackguard and infidel McCall who is their kingpin is tied up with
Southern Belle. At first they were interested but noxv they laugh at me.
What can I do? I am old and not well. I will never be any good again. I
will be a drag on you and not a help. What can I do. Sister?

You have been good to me. I thank you. Forgive me for what I am
going to do, but I am going to join our sainted Mother and our dear
Father who v/ere kind and good to us and who will greet me on the Other
Shore, and dry every tear.

Good-bye until the happy day when we shall meet again in Light.

Mortimer

P.S. I have borrowed against my insurance a good bit. On account of bad
investments. But there is something left and if they know I have done
what I am going to do they will not pay you,

P.S. Give my watch which was Father’s to Julian, who will respect it even
if he is only a cousin.

241

P.S, I could do what I am going to do easier i£ I were not trying to get the
insurance for you. I have paid for the insurance and you ought to have it.

So the poor bastai'd had gone to the Other Shore, where Mother
and Father would dry away every tear, immediately after having
instructed his sister how to defraud the insurance company. There
it all was— all of Mortimer Lonzo— the confusion, weakness, piety,
self-pity, small-time sharpness, vindictiveness, all of it in the neat,
spidery, old-fashioned bookkeeper's sort of hand, a little shakier
than ordinary perhaps, but with all the t's crossed and the i’s dotted.

I replaced it in the envelope and put it in my pocket. “I am
going to have it photostated," I said, “and you may have it back.
Ill have the photostat certified. But you must make a statement
before a notary about your visit to Governor Stanton. And—" I
went over to the table and picked up the two bills and handed them
to her— “there will be another one coming to you after you make
your statement. Get your hat."

So I had it after ail the months. For nothing is lost, nothing is
ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of
lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condon on the park
path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze,
the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all
those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them
life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe.

And we love truth.

242

Chapter Six

IT WAS late March in 1937 when I went to see Miss Littlepaugh
in the foul, fox-smelling lair in Memphis, and came to the end of
my researches. I had been on the job almost seven months. But
other things had happened during that period besides my re-
searches. Tom Stark, a sophomore, had made quarterback on the
mythical All Southern Eleven and had celebrated by wrapping
an expensive yellow sport job around a culvert on one of the
numerous new speedways which bore his father’s name. Fortunately,
a Highway Patrol car, and not some garrulous citizen, discovered
the WTeck, and the half-empty bottle of evidence was, no doubt,
flung into the night to fall in the dark waters of the swamp. Beside
the unconscious form of the Sophomore Thunderbolt lay another
form, conscious but badly battered, for in the big yellow expensive
sport job Tom had had with him a somewhat less expensive yel-
low-headed sport job, named, it turned out, Caresse Jones. So
Caresse wound up in the operating room of the hospital and not in
the swamp. She obligingly did not die, though in the future she
never would be much of an asset in a roadster. But her father was
less obliging. He stamped and swore that he was going to have
blood, and breathed indictments, jail, publicity, and lawsuits. His
fires, however, were pretty soon banked. Not that it didn’t cost some
nice change. But in the end the whole transaction was conducted
without noise, Mr. Jones was in the trucking business, and some-
body pointed out to him that trucks ran on state roads and that
truckers had a lot of contacts with certain state departments.

Tom wasn’t hurt a bit, though he lay up in the hospital uncon-
scious for three hours while the Boss, pale as a starched sheet, and
with his hair hanging and his eyes wild and sweat running down his
cheeks, paced the floor of the waiting room and ground one fist into
the palm of the dther hand while his breath made a labored sound
like the breath of his son in the room beyond. Then Lucy Stark
got there— it was about four iit the morning then— her eyes red but

243

tearless and a stunned look on her face. The) had quite a row. But
that %vas after the %vord had come out that Tom was all right. Up
till then he had paced the floor breathing hard, and she had sat and
stared straight into the blankness. But when the word came, she got
up and went over to stand before him, and say, ‘‘You must stop
him.'' Her voice was scarcely above a whisper.

He stood there staring heavily, uncomprehendingly into her face,
then put one hand out to touch her, like a bear touching something
with a clumsy exploratory paw, and said, through dry lips, “He’s—
he's going to be all right, Lucy. He's all right.”

She shook her head. “No," she said, “he's not all right.”

“The doctor—” he took a lurching step toward her— “the doctor
said-"

“No, he's not all right,” she repeated. “And won't be. Unless you
make him.”

The blood suddenly flushed heavily into his cheeks. “Now look
here, if you mean stopping football— if you—” That was an old story
between them.

“Oh, it’s not just football. That's bad enough, thinking he’s a
hero, that there’s nothing else in the world— but it’s everything that
goes with it— he's wild and selfish and idle and—”

“No boy of mine's going to be a sissy, now. That's what you
want!”

“I would rather see him dead at my feet than what your vanity
will make him.”

“Don't be a fool!”

“You will ruin him,” Her voice was quiet and even.

“Hell, let him be a man. I never had any fun growing up. Let
him have some fun! I want him to have some fun. I used to see
people having fun and never had any. I want him to—”

“You will ruin him,” she said, with her voice as quiet and even
as doom.

“God damn it!— look here—” he began, but by that time I had
sneaked out the door and had closed it softly behind me.

But Tom's accident wasn't all that happened that winter.

There was Anne Stanton's project of getting state money for the
Children's Home. She got a good handout, and was pleased as
punch with herself. She claimed she was about to get a two-year
grant, which was badly needed, she said, and was probably right,
for the springs of private charity had nigh dried up about 1929 and
weren't running more than a trickle even seven years or so later.

There were stirrings down in the Fourth District, where Mac-
Murfee still had things by the short ones. His representative got up

244

in Congress in IVashingtoii, which was far oflE but not as far off as
the moon, and aired his views about the Boss and made headlines
over the counu-y; so the Boss bought himself a big w^ad of radio
time and aired his views of Congressman Petit and treated the na-
tion to a detailed biography, in several installments, of Congress-
man Petit, who, it developed from the work of the Boss’s research
department, had thrown a grenade in a glass house. The Boss didn’t
answer anything Petit had said, he simply took care of the sayer.
The Boss knew all about the so-called fallacy of the argumentum
ad hominem. “It may be a fallacy,” he said, “but it is shore-God
useful. If you use the right kind of argumentum you can always
scare the hominem into a laundry bill he didn’t expect.”

Petit didn’t come off too well, but you had to hand it to Mac-
Murfee, he never quit trying. Tiny Duffy didn’t quit trying, either.
He was hell-bent on selling the Boss on the idea of throwing the
basic contract for the hospital to Gummy Larson, who was a power
in the Fourth District and would no doubt persuade MacMurfee,
or, to speak more plainly, would sell him out. The Boss would listen
to Tiny about as attentively as you listen to rain on the roof, and
say, “Sure, Tiny, sure, we’ll talk about it some time,” or, “God
damn it. Tiny, change your record.” Or he might say nothing in
reply, but would look at Tiny in a massive, deep-eyed, detached,
calculating way, as though he were measuring him for something,
and not say a word, till Tiny’s voice would trail off into a silence
so absolute you could hear both men’s breathing, Tiny’s breath sibi-
lant, quick, and shallow for all his bulk, the Boss’s steady and deep.

The Boss, meanwhile, was making that hospital his chief waking
thought. He took trips up East to see all the finest, biggest ones, the
Massachusetts General, the Presbyterian in New York, the Philadel-
phia General, and a lot more. “By God,” he would say, “I don’t
care how fine they are, mine’s gonna be finer, and I don’t care how
big they are, mine’s gonna be bigger, and any poor bugger in this
state can go there and get the best there is and not cost him a
dime.” When he was off on his trips he spent his time widi doctors
and architects and hospital superintendents, and never a torch
singer or a bookmaker. And when he was back home, his office was
nothing but a pile of blueprints and notebooks full of his scribbling
and books on architecture and heating systems and dietetics and
hospital management. You would come in, and he would look up
at you and begin talking right in the middle of a beat, as though
you had been there all the time, “Now up at the Massachusetts
General they’ve got—” It was his baby, all right.

But Tiny wouldn’t give up.

245

One night I came into the Mansion, saw Sugar-Boy, who was
lounging in the high, chastely proportioned hall '^vith a sheet of
newspaper across his knee, a dismantled .38 in his hand, and a can
of gun oil on the floor, asked him where the Boss was, watched him
while his lips tortured themselves to speak and the spit flew, real-
ized from tile jerk of his head that the Boss was back in the library,
and went on back to knock on the big door. As soon as I opened
the door I ran right into the Boss’s eyes like running into the busi-
ness end of a double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun at three paces, and
halted, “Look!” he commanded, heaving his bulk up erect on the
big leather couch where he had been propped, ‘"look!”

And he swung the double-barrel round to cover Tiny, who stood
at the hearthrug before him and seemed to be melting the tallow
down faster than even the log fire on the bricks would have war-
ranted.

“Look,” he said to me, “this bastard tried to trick me, tried to
smuggle that Gummy Larson in here to talk to me, gets him all the
way up here from Duboisville and thinks Fll be polite. But the hell
I was polite.” He swung to Tiny again. “Was I, was I polite?”

Tiny did not manage to utter a sound.

“Was I, God damn it?” the Boss demanded.

“No,” Tiny said, as from the bottom of a deep well.

“I was not,” the Boss said. “I didn’t let him get across that door-
sill.” He pointed at the closed door beyond me. “I told him if I
ever wanted to see him I’d send for him, and to get the hell out
But you—” and he snapped out a forefinger at Tiny— “you— ”

“I thought-”

“You thought you’d trick me— trick me into buying him. Well,
I’m not buying him, I’m going to bust him. I’ve bought too many
sons-of-bitclies already. Bust ’em and they’ll stay busted, but buy ’em
and you can’t tell how long they’ll stay bought. I bought too many
already. I made a mistake not busting you. But I figured you’d stay
bought. You’re scared not to.”

“Now% Boss,” Tiny said, “now, Boss, that ain’t fair, you know
how all us boys feel about you. And all. It ain’t being scared, it’s—”

“You damned well better be scared,” the Boss said, and his voice
was suddenly sweet and low. Like a mother whispering to her child
in the crib.

But there was new sweat on Tiny.

“Now get out!” the Boss said in a more positive tone.

I looked at the door after it had been closed upon the retreating
form, and said, “You certainly do woo your constituency,”

“Christ,” he said, and sank back on the leather of the couch and

246

shoved some of the blueprints aside. He reached up and tried to
unbutton his collar, fumbled, got impatient and snapped off the
button and jerked the tie loose. He twisted his heavy head a little
from side to side, as though the collar had been choking him.

“Christ,'' he said, almost pettishly, “can't he understand I don't
want him messing round with this thing?" And he shoved at the
blue prints again.

“What do you expect?" I asked. “There's six million dollars in-
volved. Did you ever see the flies stay away from the churn at churn-
ing time?"

“He better stay away from this churn."

“He's just being logical. Obviously, Larson is ready to sell out
MacMurfee. For a contract. He is a competent builder. He—"

He lunged up to a sitting position, stared at me and demanded,
“Are you in on this?"

“It is nothing to me," I said, and shrugged. “You can build it
with your bare hands for all of me. I merely said that, given his
premises. Tiny is logical."

“Can't you understand?" he demanded, searching my face.
“Damn it, can't you understand either?"

“I understand what I understand."

“Can’t you understand?” he demanded, and heaved up from the
couch, and the instant he was on his feet, from the slight sway of
his posture, I knew he had been drinking. He stepped to me and
seized my lapel, and shook me a little, fixing his eyes upon my face
—now close to him, I could see that they were bloodshot— and say-
ing, “Can't you understand either? I’m building that place, the best
in the country, the best in the world, and a bugger like Tiny is not
going to mess with it, and I'm going to call it the Willie Stark Hos-
pital and it will be there a long time after I'm dead and gone and
you are dead and gone and all those sons-of-bitches are dead and
gone, and anybody, no matter he hasn't got a dime, can go there—"

“And will vote for you," I said.

“I'll be dead,” he said, “and you'll be dead, and I don't care
whether he votes for me or not, he can go there and—"

“And bless your name,” I said.

“Damn it!" he shook me hard, crumpling my lapel in his big
hand, “you stand there grinning like that— get that grin off your
face— get it off or I’ll—”

“Listen,” I said, “I'm not any of your scum, and I'm still grinning
when I please."

“Jack— hell, Jack— you know I don't mean that— it's just you stand
ihiere and grin. Damn it, can't you understand? Can't you?" He

247

Iield the lapel and thrust the big face at me, his eyes gouging into
mine, saying, “Can’t you? Can’t you see I’m not going to let those
bastards muck with it? The Willie Stark Hospital? Can’t you see?
And I’m going to get me the damned best man there is to run it.
Yes, sir! The best there is. Yes, sir, up in New York they told me to
get him, he was the man. And, Jack, you—"

“Yeah?" I asked.

“You’re going to get him."

I disengaged myself from the grasp on my lapel, straightened it,
and dropped into a chair. “Get who?" I asked.

“Dr. Stanton," he said, “Dr. Adam Stanton."

I almost bounced right out of the chair. The ash off my cigarette
fell down my shirt front. “How long have you been having these
symptoms?" I asked. “You been seeing any pink elephants?"

“You get Stanton," he said.

“You are hearing voices," I said.

“You get him," he repeated dourly.

“Boss," I said, “Adam is an old pal of mine. I know him like a
brother. And I know he hates your guts."

“I’m not asking him to love me. I’m asking him to run my hos-
pital. I’m not asking anybody to love me. Not even you."

“We all love you," I mimicked Tiny, “you know how all us boys
feel."

“Get him," he said.

I stood up, stretched, yawned, moved toward the door. “I am
leaving," I declared. “Tomorrow, when you are in possession of
your faculties. I’ll hear what you’ve got to say."

And I shut the door behind me.

Tomorrow, when he was in full possession of his faculties, I heard
what he had to say, and it was: “Get Stanton."

So I went to the shabby little monastic apartment where the
grand piano glittered like a sneer in the midst of near-squalor and
the books and papers piled on chairs and the old coffee cup with
dried dregs inside which the colored girl had forgotten to pick up,
and where the friend of my youth received me as though he were
not a Success and I were not a Failure (both spelled with capital
letters), laid his hand on my shoulder, pronounced my name,
looked at me from the ice-water-blue, abstract eyes which were a re-
proach to all uncertain, twisted, and clouded things and were as un-
wavering as conscience. But the smile on his face, unsealing almost
tentatively the firm suture of the mouth, put a warmth in you, a
shy warmth like that you discover with surprise in the winter sun-
shine in late February. That smile was his apology for being what

248

he was, for looking at you the way he did, for seeing what he saw.
It did not so much forgive you, and the world, as ask forgiveness for
himself for the crime of looking straight at whatever was before
him, which might be you. But he didn't smile often. He smiled at
me not because I was what I was but because I was the Friend of
His Youth.

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have,
for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does
not exist any more, speaks a name— Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty,
Jack, Dave— which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which
by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the
moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger. But
he humors the drooling, doddering confusion of the universe and
continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which
properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy voice
called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a
campfire at night or in the middle of a crowded street said, “Gee,
listen to this— ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble; His forest
fleece the Wrekin heaves—* ** the Friend of Your Youth is your
friend because he does not see you any more.

And perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of
the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was some-
thing he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition
of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently
divulged itself like a moonflower. It didn't matter a damn to whom
he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you hap-
pened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the
appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is
irrelevant. The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will
ever have, for he hasn't the slightest concern with calculating his
interest or your virtue. He doesn't give a damn, for the moment,
about Getting Ahead or Needs Must Admiring the Best, the two
official criteria in adult friendships, and when the boring stranger
appears, he puts out his hand and smiles (not really seeing your
face) and speaks your name (which doesn't really belong to your
face), saying, “Well, Jack, damned glad you came, come on in, boy!"

So I sat in one of his broken-down easy chairs, after he had
cleared the books out, and drank his whisky, and waited for the
moment when I was going to say, “Now, listen here, I'm going to
tell you something and don’t you start yelling till I finish.”

He didn't yell till I had finished. Not that I took long to finish.
I said, ^‘Governor Stark wants you to be director of the new hospital
and medical center.”

24Q

He didn’t, to be precise, yell then. He didn’t make a sound. He
looked at me for nearly a minute, with an unsmiling clinical eye as
though my symptoms merited special attention; then he slowly
shook his heai “Better think it over,” I said, “ma)be it’s not as bad
as it sounds, tliere may be some angles—” But I let my voice trail off,
watching him shake his head again and smile now with the smile
which did not forgive me but humbly asked me to forgive him for
not being like me, for not being like everybody else, for not being
like the world.

If he had not smiled. If he had smiled but had smiled a confident,
to-hell-with-you, satirical smile. Or even a smile forgiving me. If he
had not smiled the smile which humbly, but with dignity, begged
me to forgive him, then things might have been different. But he
smiled that way out of the fullness of whatever it was he had, out
of the depth of the idea he lived by— whatever the hell it was or
whyever the hell he lived that way— and things were the way they
turned out to be. Giving that smile, he was like a man who stops to
give a beggar a buck and in opening his wallet lets the beggar catch
sight of the big roll. If the beggar hadn’t seen the big roll he would
never have followed the man down the street, waiting for the block
without the street lamp. Not so much because he wants the roll as
because he now cannot endure the man who has it and gave him a
buck.

For as he smiled and said, “But I’m not interested in the angles,”
1 did not feel that shy warmth as of the winter sunshine which I had
always felt before when he smiled, but suddenly felt something else,
which I didn’t have a name for but which was like the winter itself
and not the winter sunshine, like the stab of an icicle through the
heart. And I thought: All rights you smile like that— you smile like
that—

So, even as the thought vanished— if a thought can ever be said
to vanish, for it rises out of you and sinks back into you— so I said,
“But you don’t know what the angles are. For instance, the Boss
expects ) ou to write your ticket.”

“The Boss,” he repeated, and on the word his upper lip curled
more than customary to expose the teeth, and the sibilance seemed
exaggerated, “need not expect to buy me. I have—” he looked about
the room at the clutter and near-squalor— “everything I want.”

“The Boss isn’t any fool. You don’t think he was trying to buy
you?”

“He couldn’t,” he said.

“What do you think he was trying to do?”

“Threaten me That would be next.”

250

“No/’ I nodded, “not that. He couldn’t scare you.’^

“That is what he seems to depend on. The bribe or the threat.”

“Guess again,” I said.

He rose from his chair, took a couple of restless paces across the
frayed green carpet, then swung to face me. “He needn’t think he
can flatter me,” he said, fiercely.

“Nobody could flatter you,” I said, softly, “nobody in the world.
And do you know why?”

“Wliy?”

“Listen, pal, there was a man named Dante, who said that the
truly proud man who knew his own worth could never commit the
sin of envy, for he could believe that there was no one for him to
envy. He might just as well have said that the proud man who knew
his own worth would not be susceptible to flattery, for he would be-
lieve that there was nothing anybody else could tell him about his
own worth he didn’t know already. No, you couldn’t be flattered.”

“Not by him, anyway,” Adam said grimly.

“Not by anybody,” I said. “And he knows it.”

“What does he try for, then? Does he think I—”

“Guess again,” I said.

He stood there in the middle of the frayed green carpet and
stared at me, head slightly lowered, with the slightest shade— not
of doubt or perturbation— over the fine abstract blue of the eyes.
It was just the shade of question, of puzzlement.

But that is something. Not much, but something. It is not the
left to the jaw and it does not rock them on their heels. It does not
make the breath come sharp. It is just the tap on the nose, the
scrape across with the rough heel of the glove. Nothing lethal, just
a moment’s pause. But it is an advantage. Push it.

So I repeated, “Guess again.”

He did not answer, looking at me, with the shade deeper like a
cloud passing suddenly over blue water.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you. He knows you are the best
around, but you don’t cash in on it. So obviously, you don’t want
money, or you would charge folks something like the others in the
trade or would hang on to what you do take. You don’t want fun,
or you would get some, for you are famous, relatively young, and
not crippled. You don’t want comfort, or you would quit working
yourself like a navvy and wouldn’t live in this slum. But he knows
what you want.”

“I don’t want anything he can give me,” Adam affirmed.

“Are you sure, Adam?” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Damn it—” he began, and the blood was up in his cheeks.

251

"He knows what you want/' I cut in. "I can put it in a word,
Adam.'’

“What?”

“You w^ant to do good/' I said.

That stopped him. His mouth was open like a fish’s gaping for
air.

“Sure,” I said, “that’s it. He knows your secret.”

“I don’t see what—” he began, fiercely again.

But I cut in, saying, “Easy now, it’s no disgrace. It’s just eccen-
tric. That you can’t see somebody sick without having to put your
hands on him. That you can’t see somebody with something broken
without wanting to fix it. Somebody with something rotten inside
him without wanting to take a knife in your strong, white, and
damned well-educated fingers, pal, and cut it out. It is merely eccen-
tric, pal. Or maybe it is a kind of supersickness you’ve got your-
self.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of sick people,” he said glumly, “but I
don’t see—”

“Pain is evil,” I said, cheerfully.

“Pain is an evil,” he said, “but it is not evil— it is not evil in it-
self,” and took a step toward me, looking at me like an enemy.

“That’s the kind of question I don’t debate when I’ve got the
toothache,” I retorted, “but the fact remains that you are the way
you are. And the Boss—” 1 delicately emphasized the word Boss—
“knows it. He knows what you want. He knows your weakness, pal.
You w^ant to do good, and he is going to let you do good in whole-
sale lots.”

“Good,” he said, wolfishly, and twisted his long, thin upper lip,
“good— that s a hell of a word to use around where he is.”

“Is it?” I asked casually.

“A thing does not grow except in its proper climate, and you
know what kind of a climate that man creates. Or ought to know.”

I shrugged. “A thing is good in itself— if it iz good. A guy gets
ants in his pants and writes a sonnet. Is the sonnet less of a good—
if it is good, which I doubt— because the dame he got the ants over
happened to be married to somebody else, so that his passion, as
they say, was illicit? Is the rose less of a rose because—”

“You are completely irrelevant,” he said.

“So I am irrelevant,” I said, and got out of the chair. “That’s
what you always used to say when I got you in a corner in an
argument a thousand years ago when we were boys and argued all
night. Could a first-class boxer whip a first-class wrestler? Could a
lion whip a tiger? Is Keats better than Shelley? The good, the true,

252

and the beautiful. Is there A God? We argued all night and I alwa^'v
won, but you— you bastard—” and I slapped him on the shoulder- *
*'you always said I was irrelevant. But little Jackie is never irrele-
vant. Nor is he immaterial, and—” I looked around, scooped up my
hat and coat— “I am going to leave you with that thought and—”
hell of a thought it is,” he said, but he was grinning now, he
was my pal now, he was the Friend of My Youth.

But I ignored him anyway, saying— “You can’t say I don’t put
the cards on the table, me and the Boss, but I'm hauling out, for
I catch the midnight to Memphis, where I am going to interview
a medium.”

“A medium?” he echoed.

“An accomplished medium named Miss Littlepaugh, and she is
going to give me word from the Other Shore that the Boss’s hos-
pital is going to have a dark, handsome, famous, son-of-a-bitch of a
director named Stanton.” And with that I slammed his door and
was running and stumbling down the dark stairs, for it was the
kind of apartment house where the bulb bums out and nobody
ever puts a new one in and there is always a kiddie car left on a
landing and the carpet is worn to ribbons and the air smells dankly
of dogs, diapers, cabbage, old women, burnt grease, and the eternal
fate of man.

I stood in the dark street and looked back at the building. The
shade of a window was up and I looked in where a heavy, bald
man in shirt sleeves sat at a table in what is called a “dinette” and
slumped above a plate like a sack propped in a chair, while a child
stood at his elbow, plucking at him, and a woman in a slack color-
less dress and hair stringing down brought a steaming saucepan
from the stove, for Poppa had come home late as usual with his
bunion hurting, and the rent was past due and Johnnie needed
shoes and Susie’s report card wasn’t any good and Susie stood at
his elbow, plucking at him feebly, and staring at him with her
imbecilic eyes and breathing through her adenoids, and the Max-
field Parrish picture was askew on the wall with its blues all having
the savage tint of copper sulphate in the glaring light from the
unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling. And somewhere else in
the building a dog barked, somewhere else a baby was crying in
automatic gasps. And that was Life and Adam Stanton lived in
the middle of it, as close as he could get to it; he snuggled up to
Life, breathing the cabbage smell, stumbling on the kiddie car,
bowing to the young just-married, gum-chewing, hand-holding
couple in the hall, hearing through the thin partition the sounds
made by the old woman who would be dead (it was cancer he h?'d

253

told me) before summer, pacing the frayed green carpet among the
books and broken-down chairs. He snuggled up to Life, to keep
warm perhaps, for he didn't have any life of his own—just the
office, die knife, the monastic room. Or perhaps he didn’t snuggle
to keep warm. Perhaps he leaned over Life with his hand on the
pulse, watching from the deep-set, abstract, blue, clinical eyes,
slightly shadowed, leaning ready to pop in the pill, pour the po-
tion, apply the knife. Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep
a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be them-
selves Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill
which man had been able to achieve because he, of all the animals,
had a fine thumb.

Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life. That is some-
tiling to remember when you meet the old classmate who says,
“Well, now on our last expedition up the Congo—” or the one who
says, “Gee, 1 got the sweetest little wife and three of the swellest
kids ever—” You must remember it when you sit in hotel lobbies or
lean over bars to talk to the bartender or stand in a dark street
at night, in early March, and stare into a lighted window. And re-
member little Susie in there has adenoids and the bread is prob-
ably burned, and turn up the street, for the time has come to hand
me down that walking cane, for I got to catch that midnight train,
for all my sin is taken away. For whatever you live is Life.

As I turned away, there was the wild burst of music from up in
the building, louder than the baby’s crying, shaking the mortar
out of the old brickwork. It was Adam’s piano.

I caught the train for Memphis, stayed three days, had my stance
with Miss Littlepaugh, and returned. With some photostats and
an affidavit in my brief case.

Upon my return I found the call in my box. It was Anne’s num-
ber, then Anne’s voice on the wire, and, as always, the little leap
and plunk in my heart like a frog jumping into a lily pool. With
the ripples spreading round.

It was her voice saying she had to see me. I told her that was
easy, she could see me all the rest of her life. But she ignored that
little joke, as no doubt it deserved, and said for me to meet her
right away. “At the Crescent Cove,” I suggested, and she agreed.
The Crescent Cove was Slade’s place.

I was there first, and had a drink with Slade himself in the midst
of soft lights and sweet music and the gleam of chromium, and
looked at Slade’s yellow-ivory bullet head and expensive tailoring
and at the reigning blond at the cash register, and remembered
wistfully the morning long ago in Prohibition, when in the back

254

room of his fly-bitten speakeasy Slade, with hair on his head then
and not a dime in his pocket, had refused to fail in with Duffy's
attempt to force beer on Cousin Willie from the country, who
was, it turned out, Willie Stark, and who wanted orange pop. That
had fixed Slade up forever. So now I had my drink, and looking
at him, marveled how little is required for a man to be lost or saved.

And I looked up into the mirror of the bar and saw Anne Stan-
ton come in the door. Or rather, her image come through the image
of the door. For the moment I did not turn to face the reality. In-
stead, I looked at the image which hung there in the glass like a
recollection caught in the ice of the mind—you have seen, in win-
ter in the clear ice of a frozen stream, some clean bright gold and
red leaf embedded to make you think suddenly of the time when
all the bright gold and red leaves had been on the trees like a party
and the sunshine had poured down over them as though it would
never stop. But it wasn't a recollection, it was Anne Stanton her-
self, who stood there in the cool room of the looking glass, above
the bar barricade of bright bottles and siphons across some distance
of blue carpet, a girl-well, not exactly a girl any more, a young
woman about five-feet-four with the trimmest pair of nervous ankles
and smallish hips which, however, looked as round as though they
had been turned on a lathe, and a waist just the width to make
you wonder if you could span it with your hand, and all of this
done up in a swatch of gray flannel which pretended to a severe
mannish cut but actually did nothing but scream for attention to
some very unmannish arrangements within.

She was standing there, not quite ready to start patting the blue
carpet with an impatient toe, turning her smooth, cool face (under
a light-blue felt hat) slowly from one side to the other to survey
the room. I caught the flash of blue in her eyes as she glanced about.

Then she spotted my back by the bar and came my way. I did
not look round and did not meet her eyes in the mirror. When she
was just behind me, she said, “Jack.*'

I didn't look round, *'Slade," I said, “this strange woman keeps
following me round, and I thought you ran a respectable place.
What the hell are you going to do about it?"

Slade had swung round to look at the strange woman, whose face
was all at once chalk-white and whose eyes were uttering sparks
like a couple of arc lights. “Lady," Slade said, “now look here,
lady-"

Then the lady suddenly overcame the paralysis which had frozen
her tongue and the blood hit her cheeks, “Jack Burden!" she said,
“if you don't-"

255

)ic knows your name,” Slade said.

I turned around to face the reality which w^as not something
caught in the ice of the mind but tvas something now flushed, feline,
lethal, and electric and about to blow a fuse. “Well, I declare,” I
said, “if it isn't my fiancee! Say, Slade, I want you to meet Anne
Stanton. We’re going to get married.”

“Gee,” Slade said, his pan as dead as something in the sink next
morning, “I'm glad ter—”

“We’re getting married in twenty-hundred-and-fifty,” I said. “It
"will be a June wedding, with—”

“It will be a March murder,” Anne said, “right now.” Then she
smiled, and the blood subsided in her cheeks, and she put out her
hand to Slade.

“Glad ter meetcha,” Slade said, and though the face which he
exhibited might w^eil have belonged to a wooden Indian, the eyes
in it didn’t miss any of the details suggested by the coat suit. “How
about a drink?” he asked.

“Thank you,” Anne said, and settled on a Martini.

After the drink, she said, ”Jack, we’ve got to go,” thanked Slade
again, and led me away into the night full of neon lights, gasoline
fumes, the odor of roasted coffee, and the honk of taxis.

“You have a wonderful sense of humor,” she said.

“Where are we going?” I sidestepped her remark.

“You are such a smart aleck.”

“Where are we going?”

“Aren’t you ever going to grow up?”

“Where are we going?”

We were walking aimlessly down the side street past the swinging
doors of bars and oyster joints and past newsstands and old women
selling flowers. I bought some gardenias, gave them to her, and said,
“I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.”

We walked on another half block, threading through the crowd
that drifted and eddied in and out of the swinging doors.

“Where are we going?”

“I wouldn’t be going anywhere with you,” she said, “if I didn’t
have to talk to you.”

We were passing another old woman selling flowers. So I took
another bunch of gardenias, laid down my four bits, and shoved
the blossoms at Anne Stanton. “If you can’t be civil,” I said, “I’m
going to smother you in these damned things.”

“All right,” she said, and laughed, “all right. I’ll be good.” And
she swung on to my arm and matched her step to mine, holding
the flowers in her free hand, her bag tucked under the off elbow.

256

We kept step, not talking for a half block. I looked down, watch-
ing her feet flick out, one-two, one-two. She was wearing black suede
shoes, very severe, very mannish, and she clicked the pavement
with authority, but they were small and the fine ankles flickered,
one-two, one-two, hypnotically.

Then I said, ‘‘Where are we going?”

“To walk,” she said, “just walk. I’m too restless to be still.”

We walked on, down toward the river.

“I had to talk to you,” she said.

“Well, talk then. Sing. Spill.”

“Not now,” she said soberly and looked up at me and I saw in
the light of the street lamp that her face was very serious, even
worried. The flesh seemed smoothed back, even painfully taut over
the wonderful perfection of the bone structure of her face. There
wasn’t any waste material in that face, and always there was a
hint in it of a trained-down, keyed-up intensity, though an inten-
sity kept under the smooth surface of calm, like a flame behind
glass. But the intensity was keyed up more than usual, I could see.
And I had the feeling that if you turned the wick up a fraction the
glass might crack.

I didn’t reply, and we took a few more paces. Then she said,
“Later. Now just walk.”

So we walked. We had left the streets where the bars and pool-
rooms and restaurants were, and the blare or whimper of music
from beyond the swinging doors. We passed down a grubby, dark
street where a couple of boys scurried along by the walls of the
houses, uttering short, lost-sounding, hollow calls, like marsh birds.
The shutters were all closed on these houses, with here and there
a tiny chink of light showing, or perhaps the faint sound of voices.
Later in the spring, when the weather turned, people would be
sitting out on the sidewalk stoops here in the evenings, talking back
and forth, and now and then, if you were a man passing, one of
the women would say in a conversational tone, “Hey, bud, you
want it?” For this was the edge of the crib section, and some of
these houses were cribs. But at this season, at night, whatever kinds
of life were in these houses—the good life and the bad life— were
still withdrawn deep inside the old husks of damp, crumbling brick
or flaking wood. A month from now, in early April, at the time
when far away, outside the city, the water hyacinths would be
covering every inch of bayou, lagoon, creek, and backwater with
a spiritual-mauve to obscene-purple, violent, vulgar, fleshy, solid,
throttling mass of bloom over the black water, and the first heart-
breaking, misty green, like girlhood dreams, on the old cypresses

257

would have settled down to be leaf and not a damned thing else,
and the arm-thick, mud-colored, slime-slick mocassins would heave
out of the swamp and try to aross the highway and your front the
hitting one would give a slight bump and make a sound like ker-
tvhush and a tinny thump when he slapped heavily up against the
underside of the fender, and the insects would come boiling out of
the swamps and day and night the whole air would vibrate with
them with a sound like an electric fan, and if it was night the owls
back in the stvamps would be whoo-ing and moaning like love and
death and damnation, or one would sail out of the pitch dark into
the rays of your headlights and plunge against the radiator to ex-
plode like a ripped feather bolster, and the fields would be deep
in that rank, hairy or slick, juicy, sticky grass which the cattle gorge
on and never get flesh over their ribs for that grass is in that black
soil ai^d no matter how far the roots could ever go, if the roots were
God knows how deep, there would never be anything but that
black, grease-clotted soil and no stone down there to put calcium
into that grass-well, a month from now, in early April, when all
those diings would be happening beyond the suburbs, the husks
of the old houses in the street where Anne Stanton and I were
walking would, if it were evening, crack and spill out onto the
stoops and into the street all that life which was now sealed up
within.

But now the street was blank, and dim, with a leaning lamppost
at the end of the block, and the cobbles oily-greasy-glimmering in
its rays and the houses shuttered, and the whole thing looked like
a set for a play. You expected to see the heroine saunter up, lean
against the lamppost and light a cigarette. She didn't come, how-
ever, and Anne Stanton and I walked straight through the set,
which you knew was cardboard until you put out your hand to
touch the damp, furry brick or spongy stucco. We walked on
through without talking. Perhaps for the reason that if you are in
a place like that which looks like a cardboard stage set and is so
damned whatever you say will sound as though it had

been written by some lop-haired, swivel-hipped fellow who lived
in one of those cardboard houses in an upstairs apartment (over-
looking the patio— Oh, Jesus, yes, overlooking the patio) and wrote
a play for the Little Theater which began with the heroine saunter-
ing into a dim street between rows of cardboard houses and leaning
against an askew lamppost to light a cigarette. But Anne Stanton
was not that heroine, so she didn't lean against the lamppost and
didn't say a word, and we kept on walking.

We walked on down till we came to the river, where the ware-

258

houses were and the docks fingered out into the water. The metal
roofs of the docks glimmered dully in the rays of the street lamps.
Above the pilings of the docks a thick tangle of mist coiled and
drifted, broken here and there to show the sleek, velvety, motion-
less water, which glimmered darkly like the metal of the roofs, or
like a seal’s black, water-slick fur. A few docks down, the stubby
masts of freighters were barely visible against the dark sky. Some-
where downstream a horn was hooting and moaning. We moved
along beside the docks, looking out into the river, which was tufted
and matted over the blackness with the scraggly, cirrus, cottony
mist. But the mist stayed close to the surface of the river, and to
look out over it made you think of being on a mountain at night
and looking for miles out over clouds below. There were a few
lights over on the far shore.

We came to an open pier which I remembered as the place where
excursion boats picked up their crowds on summer afternoons for
the moonlight ride up the river— big, jostling, yelling, baby-carry-
ing, pop-and-likker-drinking, sweating crowds. But there wasn’t any
big side-wheeler there now, white as a wedding cake, cranky and
improbable, with red and gilt decorations, and no calliope was
playing “Dixie” and no whistles blowing. The place was as still as
a tomb and as blank as Gobi on a moonless night. We walked out
to the end of the pier, leaned on the railing, and looked across the
river.

“All right,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“All right,” I repeated, “I thought you wanted to talk.”

“It’s Adam,” she said.

“What about Adam?” I asked, evenly.

“You know— you know perfectly well— you went there and—”

“Look here,” I said, and I felt my blood getting up and my voice
taking on an edge, “I went there and made him a proposition. He’s
a grown man and if he doesn’t like it he doesn’t haye to take it
There’s no use blaming me and—”

“I’m not blaming you,” she said.

“You just started to jump me,” I said, “but if Adam can’t make
up his own mind and can’t take care of himself, you needn’t blame
me.”

“I’m not blaming you. Jack. You’re so jumpy and touchy. Jack.”
She laid her hand on my arm, on the rail, and patted me, and I
felt the head of steam in me drop a few pounds of pressure.

“If he can’t take care of himself, tlien you—” I began.

But she cut in, quick and sharp, “He can’t. That’s the trouble/”

259

“Noxv, look here, all I did was to offer him a proposition/’

Her hand, which had been laid on my forearm to soothe me and
pat down the steam pressure, suddenly clamped on me, driving the
fingers damned near to the bone. I jumped, and even as I jumped,
I heard her say, in a low, tense voice, almost a whisper, ‘Tou can
make him take it.”

“He’s a grown man and he—” I began.

But she cut in again, “You’ve got to make him— you’ve got to!”

“For God’s sake!” I said.

“You’ve got to,” she repeated, in that same voice, and I was sure
that the fingers clenched on my ai*m were bringing blood.

“You were just now giving me hell because I merely offered him
the proposition,” I said, “and now you say I’ve got to make him
take it.”

“I want him to take it,” she said, and her fingers fell away from
their grip.

“Weil, I’m damned,” I observed in the direction of the great in-
terstellar darkness, and then peered into her face. There wasn’t
much light— I could see the face, an unnatural chalk-white, and the
eyes were just dark gleams— but I could tell that she meant what
she said. “So you want him to take it?” I said slowly. “And you’re
Governor Stanton’s daughter and Adam Stanton’s sister, and you
want him to take it?”

“He’s got to,” she said, and I saw her small gloved hands clench
on the railing, and felt sorry for the railing. She stared out over the
coiling carpet of river mist, as from the mountain out over the
clouds hiding the dark world.

“Why?” I asked.

“I went up there/’ she said, still looking out over the river, “to
talk to him about it. I wasn’t sure he ought to when I went up. I
wasn’t sure then, but when I saw him I was.”

Something about what she was saying disturbed me, like an off-
stage noise or something caught out of the tail of your eye or an
itch that comes when your hands are full and you can’t scratch.
I was listening to what she was saying, and it wasn’t that. It was
something else. But I couldn’t catch what. So I shoved it onto the
back of the stove, and listened to what she was saying.

“Wlien I saw how he was,” she was saying, “I knew. I just knew.
Oh, Jack, he was all worked up— it wasn’t natural— just because he
had been asked. He has cut himself off from everything— from
everybody. Even from me. Not really, but it’s not like it used to be.”

“He’s awful busy,” I objected lamely,

“Busy,” she echoed, “busy— yes, he’s busy. Ever since he was in

260

medical school, he has worked like a slave. There's just something
driving him— driving him. It's not money and it's not reputation
and it’s not— I just don't know what—” Her voice drifted off.

“It is very simple,” I said. “He wants to do good.”

“Good," she echoed. Then, “I used to think so— oh, he does good
-but-"

“But what?”

“Oh, I don't know— and I shouldn't say it— I shouldn't— but I
almost think that the work— even the doing good— everything is
just a way to cut himself off. Even from me— even me—"

Then she said, “Oh, Jack, we had an awful row. It was awful.
I went home and cried all night. You know how we’ve always been.
And to have a terrible row. You know how we've been? You know?”
She insisted, and clutched my arm, as though to make me agree,
to make me tell her how they had been.

“Yes,” I said, “I know.” I looked at her and was afraid for a
second she was going to cry again, but she didn't, and I should
have known it, for she was the kind that did her crying on the mid-
night pillow. If she did any.

“I told him,” she was saying, “I told him that if he wanted to
do any good— really do any good— here was the time. And the way.
To see that the Medical Center was run right. And even expanded.
And all that. But he just froze up and said he wouldn't touch the
thing. And I accused him of being selfish— of being selfish and
proud— of putting his pride before everything. Before doing good-
before his duty. Then he just glared at me, and grabbed me by
the wrist and said I couldn't understand anything, that a man
owed himself something. I said it was his pride, just his pride, and
he said he was proud not to touch filth, and if I wanted him to do
that I could just—” She stopped, took a breath and, I guessed, a
new grip on her nerve to say what she was about to say. “Well, what
he was going to say was that I could get out. But he didn't say it,
I'm glad—” she paused again— “I'm glad he didn't say it. At least,
he didn't say it.”

“He didn’t mean it,” I said,

“I don't know— I don't know. If you had seen his eyes blazing and
his face all white and drawn. Oh, Jack—” she grabbed my arm
again, and shook me as though I were holding back an answer—
“why won't he do it? Why is he this way? Doesn't he see he ought
to? That he's the man and he's got to? Why, Jack? Why?”

“To be perfectly brutal,” I said, “it is because he is Adam Stan-
ton, the son of Governor Stanton and the grandson of Judge Pey-
ton Stanton and the great-grandson of General Morgan Stanton,

261

and he has lived all his life in the idea that there was a time a long
time back when everything was run by high-minded, handsome
men wearing knee breeches and silver buckles or Continental blue
or frock coats, or even buckskin and coonskin caps, as the case may
be—for Adam Stanton isn't any snob— who sat around a table and
candidly debated the good of the public thing. It is because he is
a romantic, and he has a picture of the world in his head, and
when tlie world doesn’t conform in any respect to the picture, he
wants to throw the world away. Even if that means throwing out
the baby with the bath. Which,” I added, “it always does mean.”

That held her for a moment. She turned her face from me and
looked out over the misty river again. Then she murmured, “He
ought to take it.”

“Well,” I said, “if you want him to do it, you’ve got to change
the picture of the world inside his head. If I know Adam Stanton.”
And I did know Adam Stanton, and at that moment I could see his
face with the skin drawn back tight over the bone and the strong
month like the neatly healed wound and the deep-set blue eyes
blazing like pale ice.

She hadn’t answered me.

“That’s the only way,” I said, “and you might as well settle for
that.”

“He ought to do it,” she whispered, looking over the river.

“How much do you want him to?”

She swung to me, and I peered into her face. Then she said,
•‘As much as I want anything.”

“You mean that?” I said.

“I mean it. He’s got to. To save himself.” She grabbed my arm
again. “For himself. As much as for everybody else. For himself.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure,” she said, fiercely.

“I mean sure that you want him to do it? More than anything?”

“Yes,” she said.

I studied her face. It was a beautiful face— or if not beautiful,
better than beautiful, a tense, smooth, spare-modeled, finished face,
and it was chalk-white in the shadow and the eyes were dark
gleams. I studied her face, and for the moment just did that and
let all the questions just slide away, like something dropped into
the mist and water below us to slide away in the oily silence of
the current.

“Yes,” she repeated, whispering.

But I kept on peering into her face, really looking at it for the

262

first time, after all the years, for the close, true look at a thing can
only be one snatched outside of time and the questions.

‘Tes,’’ she whispered, and laid her hand on my arm, lightly this
time.

And at the touch I came out of what I had been sunk in.

“All right, “ I said, shaking myself, “but you don’t know what
you are asking for.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Can you make him?”

“I can,” I said.

“Well, why didn’t you—why did you wait— why— ”

“I don’t think—” I said slowly— “I don’t think I would have ever
done it— at least, not this way— if you, you yourself, hadn’t asked
me.

“How can you do it?” she demanded, and the fingers closed on
.my arm.

“It is easy,” I said, “I can change that picture of the world he
carries around in his head.”

“How?”

“I can give him a history lesson.”

“A history lesson?”

“Yes, I am a student of history, don’t you remember? And what
we students of history always learn is that the human being is a
very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad
but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad
out of good, and the devil take the hindmost. But Adam, he is a
scientist, and everything is tidy for him, and one molecule of
oxygen always behaves the same way when it gets around two
molecules of hydrogen, and a thing is always what it is, and so
when Adam the romantic makes a picture of the world in his head,
it is just like the picture of the world Adam the scientist works
with. All tidy. All neat. The molecule of good always behaves the
same way. The molecule of bad always behaves the same way.
There are—”

“Stop it,” she ordered, “stop it, and tell me. You are trying not
to tell me. You are talking so you won’t tell me. Now, tell me.”

“All right,” I said. “You remember I asked you about Judge
Irwin being broke? Well, he was. His wife wasn’t rich, either. He
just thought she was. And he took a bribe.”

“Judge Irwin?” she echoed. “A bribe?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I can prove it.”

“He— he was father’s friend, he was—” She paused, straightened
herself, swung her face from me and looked out over the river, theut
after a moment, in a sturdy voice, as though not to me but to the

263

whole wide world over there beyond the mist: '‘Well, that doesn’t
prove anything. Judge Irwin.”

I didn’t reply. I, too, stared out over the coiling mist, in the dark.

I was aware, though 1 didn’t look, when she turned toward me
again.

“Well, say something,” she said, and I heard the tension in her
voice.

But I didn’t say anything. I stood there w^aiting; and waiting, I
could hear, in the silence, the tiny suck and lapping about the piles
down in the mist.

Then she said, “Jack— -was my— was my father— was— ”

I didn’t answer.

“You coward!” she said, “you coward, you won’t tell me.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did he take a bribe? Did he? Did he?” She had grabbed my
arm and w^as shaking me, hard.

“Not that bad,” I said.

“Not that bad, not that bad,” she mimicked, and burst out
laughing, hanging on my arm. Then she suddenly released me,
thrust my arm from her as though it were foul, and shrank back.
“I don’t believe it,” she announced.

“It’s true,” I said. “He knew about Irwin and protected him.
I can prove it. I have documents. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“Oh, you’re sorry! You’re so sorry. You dug it all up, all the lies—
for that man— for that Stark— for him— and you— you’re so sorry.”
And she began to laugh again, and swung away, and was running
down the pier, laughing and stumbling as she ran.

I ran after her.

I was just about to grab her, at the end of the pier, when the cop
stepped out of the shadow of the warehouse, and said, “Hey,
buddy!”

Just then, Anne stumbled and I grabbed her by the arm. She
swayed in my grasp.

The cop approached. “What’s up?” he demanded. “What you
runnen that dame fer?”

“She’s hysterical,” I said, talking fast, “I’m just trying to take
care of her, she’s had a few drinks, just a couple, and she’s hys-
terical, she’s had a great shock, a grief—”

The cop, heavy, squat, hairy, took one waddling stride toward
us, then leaned and whiffed her breath.

“—she’s had a shock, and it has upset her so she took a drink,
and she’s hysterical. I’m trying to get her home.”

264

His beefy, black-jowled face swung toward me. “I’ll get you
home,” he allowed, “in the wagon. If you ain’t careful.”

He was just talking. I knew he was just talking to hear himself,
for it was late and he was bored and dull. I knew that, and should
have said, respectfully, that I would be careful, or have said, laugh-
ing and perhaps winking, that sure. Captain, I’d get her home.
But I didn’t say either thing. I was all keyed up, and she was sway-
ing in my clutch, making a kind of sharp, broken noise with her
breathing, and his God-damned beefy, black-jowled face was there
in front of me. So I said, “The hell you will.”

His eyes bugged out a little at that, the jowls swelled with black
blood, and he lunged one step closer, fingering his stick, saying,
“The hell I won’t. I’m gonna right now, both of you, by God!”

Then he said, “Come on,” prodded me with the stick, and re-
peated, “Come on,” herding me toward the end of the pier, where,
no doubt, the box w^as he would use to call.

I took two or three steps forward, feeling the prod of the stick
in the small of my back, dragging Anne, who hadn’t said a word.
Then I remembered, “Listen here, if you want to be on the force
in the morning, you better listen to me.”

“Listen, hell,” he rejoined and jabbed my kidney a little harder.

“If it weren’t for the lady,” 1 said, “I’d let you go on and bust
yourself. I don’t mind a ride to headquarters. But I’ll give you a
chance.”

“Chance,” he echoed, and spat from the side of his mouth, and
jabbed again.

“I’m going to reach into my pocket,’* I said, “not for a gun, just
for my wallet, so I can show you something. Did you ever hear of
Willie Stark?”

“Sure,” he said. And jabbed.

“You ever hear of Jack Burden,” I asked, “that newspaper fellow
who is a sort of secretary to Willie?”

He reflected a moment, still prodding me on. “Yeah,” he said
then, grudgingly.

“Then maybe you’d like my card,” I said, and reached for the
wallet.

“Naw, you don’t,” he said, and let the weight of the stick lie
across my lifted forearm, “naw, you don’t, I’m gitten it myself.”

He reached in for the wallet, took it, and started to open it. As a
matter of principle.

“You open that,” I said, “and I’ll bust you anyway, call the
wagon or not. Give it here.”

He passed it over to me. I drew out a card, and handed it to him.

265

He studied it in the bad light. “Jeez,” he said, with a slight hiss-
ing sound like the air escaping from a child’s balloon, “how wuz
I to know you wmz on the pa^nroll?”

“You damned w’ell better find out next time,” I said, “before you
get gay. Now call me a cab.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, hating me with the pig’s eyes out of the swol-
len face. “Yes, sir,” he said, and went to the box.

Suddenly Anne pulled herself loose from me, and I thought she
going to run. So I grabbed her again. “Oh, you’re so wonder-
ful,” she said, in a harsh w^hisper, “so wonderful— you’re grand—
you bully the bullies— you cop the cops— you’re wonderful—”

I stood there holding her, not listening, aware only of a weight
in my middle like a cold stone.

“—you’re so wonderful— and dean— everything is so wonderful
and clean—”

I didn’t say anything.

“—you’re so damned wonderful— and clean and strong— oh, you’re
a hero—”

“I’m sorry I acted like a son-of-a-bitch,” I said.

“I can’t imagine to what particular thing you are referring,” she
whispered in mock sweetness, underscoring the particular, setting
it meticulously in my hide like a banderilla. Then she swung her
face from me, and wouldn’t look at me, and the arm I clutched
might as well have belonged to a dummy in a show window, and
the cold stone in my stomach was a stone in a deep well covered
with slime, and the pig’s eyes in the swollen, black-jowled face
came back and hated me in the dull, mist-streaked night, and a
horn moaned down the river, and in the cab Anne Stanton sat back
in one corner, very straight and as far from me as possible, and the
light from street lamps we passed would flicker across her white
face. She would not speak to me. Until we came to a street with a
car track on it. Then she said, “Get out. You can catch some car
here. I don’t want you to take me home.”

So I got out.

Five nights later I heard Anne Stanton’s voice on the telephone.

It said, “Those things— those papers you said you had— send them
to me.”

I said, “I’ll bring them.”

It said, “No. Send them.”

I said, “All right. I’ve got extra photostats of one thing. Tomor-
row I’ll get a photostat of the other paper and send them together/'

It said, “A photostat. So you don’t trust me.”

266

I said, 'I’ll send them tomorrow.”

Then there was the click, in the little black tube. Then the tiny,
windy, humming sound which is the sound of space failing away
from you, and of infinity, and of absolute nothingness.

Every night when I came into my room, I would look at the
telephone. I would say to myself: It is going to ring. Once, even,
I was sure that it had rung, for the tingle and stab of its ringing
was in all my nerves. But it hadn’t rung. I had merely fallen asleep.
Once I picked up the thing and held it to my ear, listening to the
tiny, humming sound which is the sound of the various things I
have already mentioned.

Every night, at the desk in the lobby, I asked if there had been
any numbers left for me. Yes, sometimes there were numbers. But
never the right number.

Then I would go up to my room, where the telephone was and
the brief case with the photostat and the affidavit from Memphis.
I hadn’t given that to the Boss yet. I hadn’t even told him about it
yet. Not that I was thinking about not giving it to him, I would
give it to him. That was in the cards. But not yet. Not quite yet.
After the telephone had rung.

But it didn’t ring.

Instead, after about a week, one night as I turned the corner of
the corridor, I saw a woman sitting on the bench down beyond my
door. I fumbled for my key, inserted it in the lock, and was about
to enter when I was aware that the woman stood beside me. I
swung toward her. It was Anne Stanton.

She had made no sound on the deep carpet. Not with her light
foot.

"You gave me heart failure,” I said, and swung the door wide,
and added, "Come in.”

"I thought you were so careful about my reputation,” she said.
"At least you claimed to be. Once.”

"I remember,” I said, "but come in anyway.”

She walked into the room and stood in the middle of the floor
with her back to me while I shut the door. I noticed that she had
a brown manila envelope in her hand, with her bag.

Not turning to me, she stepped to the desk by the wall and flung
down the envelope. "There it is,” she said. "The photostats. I
brought them back. But I would have brought back the originals
if you had trusted me with them.”

"I know it,” I said.

"It was awful,” she said, still not turning to me.

267

I went across to her and touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It was awful. You don’t know.”

I didn’t know how awful. So I stood there just behind her and
didn’t dare to touch her again, even with the weight of my finger,

“You don’t know,” she said.

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“It was awful.” Then she turned to put her wide eyes on me,
and I had the impression of stumbling into a well. “It was awful,”
she said. “I gave them to him—those things— and he read them and
then he just stood there— he didn’t move— he didn’t make a sound—
and his face was white as a sheet and I could hear him breathing.
Then I touched him— and he looked at me— he looked at me a long
time. Then he said— he looked at me and said, ‘You.’ That was
what he said, ‘You.’ Looking at me.”

“God damn it,” I said, “God damn it, what’s he blaming you for,
why doesn’t he blame Governor Stanton?”

“He does,” she said. “Oh, he blames him. That is what is so
awful. The way he blames him. His father. You remember— you
remember. Jack—” she reached out and laid her hand on my fore
arm— “you remember— our father— how he was— how he used to read
to us— how he loved us— how he taught Adam and how proud he
was of him— how he took all that time to teach Adam himself—
oh, Jack, he sat there in front of the fire and I was a little girl and
he would read to us and I put my head against his knee— oh. Jack—
you remember?”

“I remember,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “yes— and mother was dead and father did all he
could— he was so proud of Adam— and now Adam— and now—” She
released my arm, and stepped back and lifted her hands, putting
her fingers to her forehead in a distracted gesture. “Oh, Jack, what
have I done?” she whispered.

“You did what you thought you ought to do,” I said firmly.

“Yes,” she whispered, “yes, that was it.”

“It’s done now,” I said.

“Yes, it is done,” she said, out loud, and her jaw closed with an
expression which suddenly made her look like Adam, the mouth
firm and sealed, the skin drawn and tight on the flesh, and she lifted
her head to stare the world down, and I felt like bursting into tears.
If that had been my habit.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s done.”

“He’ll do it,” she said.

And I almost demanded, What, do what? For, for the moment, I
had forgotten the reason that I had told Anne the facts, the reason

268

that I had given her the photostats, the reason that she had shown
them to her brother. I had forgotten that there was a reason. But I
remembered now, and questioned, “You persuaded him?”

“No,” she shook her head slowly, “no, I didn’t say anything. I
gave those things to him. He knew,”

“What happened?”

“What I told you. He looked at me hard, and said *You.’ Just like
that. Then I said, ‘Adam, don’t say it that way, you mustn’t, Adam,
you mustn’t!’ And he said, ‘Wliy?’ And I said, ‘Because I love you,
because I love him, love Father.’ And he kept on looking at me,
then said, ‘Love him!’ Then, ‘Damn his soul to hell!’ I called out,
‘Adam, Adam,’ but he turned his back on me, and walked across the
1 oom to his bedroom door and went in and shut the door. Then I
went out and walked by myself, in the dark, for a long time. So I
could sleep. For three days I didn’t hear from him. Then he asked
me to come to see him. I went, and he gave me back those things.”
She pointed to the manila envelope. “He told me to tell you that he
would do it. To arrange it. That was all.”

“That was a good deal,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and moved past me toward the door. She put her
hand to the knob, turned it, and drew the door ajar. She looked
back at me, and said, “Yes, it was a good deal.”

And went out.

But she stood with her hand on the doorjamb. “One thing,” she
said.

“What?” I asked.

“A favor,” she said, “to me. Before you ever use those things,
those papers, show them to Judge Irwin. Give him a chance. At
least, a chance.”

I agreed to that.

The big black Cadillac, the hood glistening dully under the
street lamps— as I could see even from the back seat— eased down the
street, making its expensive whisper under the boughs which had
new leaves on them, for it was early April now. Then we got to a
street where there were not any nice trees arching over.

“Here,” I said, “that place on the right, just beyond that grocery.”

Sugar-Boy put the Cadillac up to the curb, like a mother laying
Little Precious down with a last kiss. Then he ran around to open
the door for the Boss, but the Boss was already on the curb. I un-
coiled myself and stood beside him. “This is the joint,” I remarked,
and started in.

For we were going to see Adam Stanton.

269

When I told the Boss that Adam Stanton would take the job and
that he had sent me a message to arrange things, the Boss had said,
“Well.” Then he had looked at me from toe to crown, and said,
“You must be Svengali.”

“Yeah,” I had said, “I am Svengali.”

“I want to see him,” the Boss had said.

“Fll try to get him up here.”

“Get him up here?” the Boss had said. “I’ll go there. Hell, he’s
doing me a favor.”

“Well, you’re the Governor, aren’t you?”

“You’re damned right I am,” the Boss had said, “but he is Doc
Stanton. Wlien do we go?”

I had told him it would have to be at night, that you never could
catch him except at night.

So here we were, at night, entering the door of the crummy apart-
ment house, climbing the dark stairs, stumbling over the kiddie car,
inhaling the odor of cabbage and diapers. “He sure picked himself
a place to live,” the Boss said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “and lots of folks can’t figure out why.”

“I reckon I can,” the Boss said.

And as I wondered whether he could or not, we reached the door,
and I knocked, entered, and confronted the level eyes of Adam
Stanton.

For a half moment, while Sugar-Boy was easing in, and I was shut-
ting the door, Adam and the Boss simply took each other in, with-
out a word. Then I turned and said, “Governor Stark, this is Dr.
Stanton.”

The Boss took a step forward and put out his right hand. Per-
haps I imagined it, but I thought I noticed a shade of hesitation be-
fore Adam took it. And the Boss must have noticed it, too, for when
Adam did put out his hand, the Boss, in the middle of the shake,
before any other word had been spoken, grinned suddenly, and said,
“See, boy, it’s not as bad as you thought, it won’t kill you.”

Then, by God, Adam grinned, too.

Then I said, “And this is Mr. O’Shean,” and Sugar-Boy lurched
forward and put out one of his stubby arms with a hand hanging
on the end of it like a stulfed glove, and twisted his face and began,
“I’m pl-pl-pl-pl—”

“I’m glad to know you,” Adam said. Then I saw his glance pick
up the bulge under Sugar-Boy’s left armpit. He turned to the Boss.
“So this is one of your gunmen I’ve heard about?” he said, definitely
not grinning now.

270

the Boss said, “Sugar-Boy just carries that for fun. Sugar-
Boy is just a pal. Ain't anybody can drive a car like Sugar-Boy."

Sugar-Boy was looking at him like a dog you’ve just scratched on
the head.

Adam stood there, and didn’t reply. For a second I thought the
deal was about to blow up. Then Adam said, very formally, “Won't
you gentlemen have seats?"

We did.

Sugar-Boy sneaked one of his lumps of sugar out of the side
pocket of his coat, put it into his mouth, and began to suck it, with
his fey Irish cheeks drawn in and his eyes blurred with bliss.

Adam waited, sitting straight up in his chair.

The Boss, leaning back in one of the overstuffed wrecks, didn’t
seem to be in any hurry. But he finally said, “Well, Doc, what do
you think of it?"

“Of what?" Adam demanded.

“Of my hospital?"

“I think it will do the people of the state some good," he said*
Then added, “And get you some votes."

“You can forget about the vote side of it," the Boss said, “There
are lots of ways to get votes, son."

*“So I understand," Adam said. Then he handed the Boss another
big chunk of silence to admire.

The Boss admired it awhile, then said, “Yeah, it’ll do some good.
But not too much unless you take over."

“I won’t stand any interference," Adam said, and bit the sentence
off.

“Don’t worry," the Boss laughed. “I might fire you, boy, but I
wouldn’t interfere."

“If that is a threat," Adam said, and the pale-blue blaze flickered
up in his eyes, “you have wasted your time by coming here. You
know my opinions of this administration. They have been no secret.
And they will be no secret in the future. You understand that?"

“Doc," the Boss said, “Doc, you just don’t understand politics.
I’ll be frank with you. I could run this state and ten more like it
with you howling on every street corner like a hound with a sore
tail. No offense. But you just don’t understand."

“I understand some things," Adam said grimly, and the jaw set.

“And some you don^t, just like I don’t, but one thing I under-
stand and you don’t is what makes the mare go. I can make the
mare go. i\nd one more thing, now we are taking down our hair—"
The Boss suddenly stopped, cocked his head, leered at Adam, then
demanded, “Or are we?"

271

*Tou said there was one more thing/’ Adam replied, ignoring the
question, sitting straight in his chair.

'‘Yeah, one more thing. But look here, Doc— you know Hugh
Miller?”

“Yes,” Adam said, “yes, I know him.”

“Well, he was in with me— yeah. Attorney General— and he re-
signed. And you know w^hy?” But he went on without waiting for
the answer. “He resigned because he wanted to keep his little hands
clean. He wanted the bricks but he just didn’t know somebody has
to paddle in the mud to make ’em. He was like somebody that just
loves beefsteak but just can’t bear to go to a slaughter pen because
there are some bad, rough men down there who aren’t animal lovers
and who ought to be reported to the S.P.C.A. Well, he resigned.”

I watched Adam’s face. It was white and stony, as though carved
out of some slick stone. He was like a man braced to hear what the
jury foreman was going to say. Or what the doctor was going to say.
Adam must have seen a lot of faces like that in his time. He must
have had to look into them and tell them what he had to tell.

“Yeah,” the Boss said, “he resigned. He was one of those guys
wants everything and wants everything two ways at once. You know
the kind. Doc?”

He flicked a look over at Adam, like a man flicking a fly over by
the willows in the trout stream. But there wasn’t any strike.

“Yeah, old Hugh— he never learned that you can’t have every-
thing. That you can have mighty little. And you never have any-
thing you don’t make. Just because he inherited a little money and
the name Miller he thought you could have everything. Yeah, and
he wanted the one last damned thing you can’t inherit. And you
know what it is?” He stared at Adam’s face.

“What?” Adam said, after a long pause.

“Goodness. Yeah, just plain, simple goodness. Well you can’t in-
herit that from anybody. You got to make it. Doc. If you want it.
And you got to make it out of badness. Badness. And you know
why, Doc?” He raised his bulk up in the broken-down wreck of an
overstuffed chair he was in, and leaned forward, his hands on his
knees, his elbows cocked out, his head outthrust and the hair com-
ing down to his eyes, and stared into Adam’s face. “Out of badness,”
he repeated. “And you know why? Because there isn’t anything else
to make it out of.” Then, sinking back into the wreck, he asked,
softly, “Did you know that. Doc?”

Adam didn’t say a word.

Then the Boss asked, softer still, almost whispering, “Did you
know that, Doc?”

272

Adam wet his lips and said, “There is one question I should like
to ask you. It is this. If, as you say, there is only the bad to start
with, and the good must be made from the bad, then how do you
ever know what the good is? How do you even recognize the good?
Assuming you have made it from the bad. Answer me that.''

“Easy, Doc, easy,” the Boss said.

“Well, answer it.”

“You just make it up as you go along.”

“Make up what?”

“The good,” the Boss said, “What the hell else are we talking
about. Good with a capital G.”

“So you make it up as you go along?” Adam repeated gently.

“What the hell else you think folks been doing for a million
years, Doc? When your great-great-grandpappy climbed down out
of the tree, he didn't have any more notion of good or bad, or right
and wrong, than the hoot owl that stayed up in the tree. Well, he
climbed down and he began to make Good up as he went along. He
made up what he needed to do business, Doc. And what he made
up and got everybody to mirate on as good and right was always
just a couple of jumps behind what he needed to do business on.
That's why things change, Doc. Because what folks claim is right
is always just a couple of jumps short of what they need to do busi-
ness. Now an individual, one fellow, he will stop doing business
because he’s got a notion of what is right, and he is a hero. But
folks in general, which is society, Doc, is never going to stop doing
business. Society is just going to cook up a new notion of what is
right. Society is sure not ever going to commit suicide. At least, not
that way and of a purpose. And that is a fact. Now ain’t it?”

“It is?” Adam said.

“You’re damned right it is. Doc. And right is a lid you put on
something and some of the things under the lid look just like some
of the things not under the lid, and there never was any notion of
what was right if you put it down on folks in general that a lot of
them didn’t start squalling because they just couldn’t do any human
business under that kind of right. Hell, look at when folks couldn’t
get a divorce. Look at all the good women got beat and the good
men got nagged and couldn’t do any human damned thing about
it. Then, all of a sudden, a divorce got to be right. What next, you
don’t Nor me. But I do know this.” He stopped, leaned for-

ward again, the elbows again cocked out.

“What?” Adam demanded.

“This. I’m not denying there’s got to be a notion of right to get
business done, but by God, any particular notion at any particular

273

time will sooner or later get to be just like a stopper put tight in a
bottle of water and thrown in a hot stove the way we kids used to
do at school to hear the bang. The steam that blows the bottle and
scares the teacher to ^vet her drawers is just the human business that
is going to get done, and it will bloTV anything )ou put it in if you
seal it tight, but )ou put it in the right place and let it get out in a
certain way and it will run a freight engine.” He sank oack again
into the chair, his eyelids sagging now, but the eyes watchful, and
the hair down over his forehead like an ambush.

Adam got up suddenly, and walked aa*oss the room. He stopped
in front of the dead fireplace, with old ashes still in it, and some
half-burned paper, though spring was on us, and there hadn’t been
any fire for a time. The window w^as up, and the night air came
into the room, with a smell different from the diaper-and-cabbage
smell, a smell of damp grass and the leaves hanging down from the
arched trees in the dark, a smell that definitely did not belong there
in that room. And all of a sudden I remembered once how into a
room where I was sitting one night, a big pale apple-green moth,
big as a bullbat and soft and silent as a dream— a Luna moth, the
name is, and it is a wonderful name— came flying in. Somebody had
left the screen door open, and the moth drifted in over the tables
and chairs like a big pale-green, silky, live leaf, drifting and dancing
along without any wind under the electric light where a Luna moth
certainly did not belong. The night air coming into the room now
was like that.

Adam leaned an elbow on the wooden mantelpiece where you
could write your name in the dust and the books were stacked and
the old, dregs-crusted coffee cup sat. He stood there as though he
were ail by himself.

The Boss was watching him.

'Teah,” the Boss said, watchful, “it will run a freight engine
and—”

But Adam broke in, “What are you trying to convince me of?
You don’t have to convince me of anything. I’ve told you I’d take
the job. That’s all!” He glared at the bulky man in the big chair,
and said, “That’s all! And my reasons are my own.”

The Boss gave a slow smile, shifted his weight in the chair, and
said, “Yeah, your reasons are your own, Doc. But I just thought you
might want to know something about mine. Since wehe going to
do business together.”

“I am going to run the hospital,” Adam said, and added with
curling lip, “If you call that doing business together.”

The Boss laughed out loud. Then he got up from the chain

*‘Doc/’ he said, “just don’t you worry. Hi keep your little mitts
clean. Ill keep you clean all over, Doc. Ill put you in that beauti-
ful, antiseptic, sterile, six-million-dollar hospital, and wrap you in
cellophane, untouched by human hands.” He stepped to Adam,
and slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry. Doc,” he said.

‘1 can take care of myself,” Adam affirmed, and looked down at
the hand on his shoulder.

“Sure you can, Doc,” the Boss said. He removed his hand from
the shoulder. Then his tone changed, suddenly businesslike and
calm. “You will no doubt want to see all the plans which have been
drawn up. They are subject to your revision after you consult with
the architects. Mr. Todd, of Todd and Waters, will come to see you
about it. And you can start picking your staff. It is all your baby.’'

He turned away and picked up his hat from the piano top. He
swung back toward Adam and gave him a summarizing look, from
top to toe and back. “You’re a great boy. Doc,” he said, “and don’t
let ’em tell you different.”

Then he wheeled to the door, and went out before Adam could
say a word. If there was any word he had to say.

Sugar-Boy and I followed. We didn’t stop to say good night and
thanks for the hospitality. That just didn’t seem to be in the cards.
At the door, however, I looked back and said, “So long, boy,” but
Adam didn’t answer.

Down in the street, the Boss hesitated on the curb, beside the car.
Then he said, “You all go on. I’m walking.” He turned up the
street, toward town, past the crummy apartment house and thi,*;
little grocery and the boarding houses and the shotgun bungalows.

Just as I climbed in beside Sugar-Boy, in the place the Boss always
took, I heard the burst of music from the apartment house. The
window was open and the music was very loud. Adam was beating
the hell out of that expensive piano, and filling the night air with
racket like Niagara Falls.

We rolled down the street, and passed the Boss, who, walking
along with his head down, didn’t pay us any mind. We pulled on
into one of the good streets with the trees arching overhead and the
new leaves looking black against the sky, or pale, almost whitish,
where the rays of a street lamp struck them. We were beyond the
sound of Adam’s music now.

I lay back and closed my eyes and took the sway and dip of the
car, which was soft and easy, and thought of the Boss and Adam
Stanton facing each other across that room. I had never expected to
see that. But it had happened,

I had found the truth, I had dug the truth up out of the ash pile^

275

the garbage heap, the kitchen midden, the bone yard, and had sent
that little piece of truth to Adam Stanton. I couldn’t cut the truth
to match his ideas. "Well, he’d have to make his ideas match the
truth. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. The truth
shall make you free.

So I lay back and thought of Adam and the truth. And of the
Boss and what he had said the truth was. The good was. The right
was. And lying there, lulled in the Cadillac, 1 wondered if he be-
lieved w^hat he had said. He had said that you have to make the
good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out
of. Well, he had made some good out of some bad. The hospital.
The Willie Stark Hospital, which was going to be there when
Willie Stark was dead and gone. As Willie Stark had said. Now if
Willie Stark believed that you always had to make the good out of
the bad, why did he get so excited when Tiny just wanted to make
a logical little deal witli the hospital contract? Why did he get so
heated up just because Tiny’s brand of Bad might get mixed in
the raw materials from which he was going to make some Good?
'‘Can’t you understand?” the Boss had demanded of me, grabbing
my lapel. “Can’t you understand, either? I’m building that place,
the best in the country, the best in the world, and a bugger like
Tiny is not going to mess with it, and I’m going to call it the Willie
Stark Hospital and it will be there a long time after I’m dead and
gone and you are dead and gone and all those sons-o£-bitches are
dead and gone—” That was scarcely consistent. It was not at all
consistent. I would have to ask the Boss about it sometime.

I had asked the Boss about something else once. The night after
the impeachment blew up. The night when the great crowd that
had poured into town stood on the lawm of the Capitol, trampling
the flower beds beneath the great frock-coated and buckskin-clad
and sword-bearing bronze statues which were History. When out of
the tall dark doorway of the Capitol, under the blue glares of the
spotlights Willie Stark walked out to stand at the top of the high
steps, heavy and slow-looking, blinking in the light. He stood there,
the only person up there on the wide expanse of stone, seeming to
be lonely and lost against the mass of stone which reared behind
him, standing there blinking. The long chant of “Willie— Willie—
we want Willie,” which had swelled up from the crowd, stopped as
he came out. For an instant as he waited, there wasn’t a sound.
Then suddenly there was the great roar from the crowd, without
any words. It was a long time before he lifted his hand to stop it.
Then the roar died away as tiiough under the pressure of his slowly
descending hand. ^

276

Then he said, '‘They tried to ruin me, but they are ruined/’

And the roar came again, and died away, under the hand.

He said, “They tried to ruin me because they did not like what
I have done. Do you like what I have done?”

The roar came, and died.

He said, “I tell you what I am going to do. I am going to build
a hospital. The biggest and the finest money can buy. It will belong
to you. Any man or woman or child who is sick or in pain can go
in those doors and know that all will be done that man can do. To
heal sickness. To ease pain. Free. Not as charity. But as a right. It
is your right. Do you hear? It is your right!”

The roar came.

He said, “And it is your right that every child shall have a com-
plete education. That no person aged and infirm shall want or beg
for bread. That the man who produces something shall be able to
carry it to market without miring to the hub, without toll. That no
poor man’s house or land shall be taxed. That the rich men and the
great companies that draw wealth from this state shall pay this state
a fair share. That you shall not be deprived of hope!”

The roar came. As it died away, Anne Stanton, who had her arm
through mine and was pressed close by the weight of the crowd,
asked, “Does he mean that, Jack? Really?”

“He’s done a good deal of it already,” I said.

“Yes,” Adam Stanton said, and his lips curled back with the
words, “yes— that’s his bribe,”

I didn’t answer— and I didn’t know what my answer would have
been— for Willie Stark, up there on the high steps, was saying, “I
will do those tilings. So help me God. I shall live in your will and
your right. And if any man tries to stop me in the fulfilling of that
right and tliat will I’ll break him. I’ll break him like that!” He
spread his arms far apart, shoulder-high, and crashed the right fist
into the left palm. “Like that! I’ll smite him. Hip and thigh, shim
bone and neckbone, kidney punch, rabbit punch, uppercut, and
solar plexus. And I don’t care what I hit him with. Or how!”

Then, in the midst of the roar, I leaned toward Anne’s ear and
yelled, “He damned well means that.”

I didn’t know whether or not Anne heard me. She was watching
the man up there on the steps, who was leaning forward toward the
crowd, with bulging eyes, saying, “I’ll hit him. I’ll hit him with that
meat axl”

Then he suddenly stretched his arms above his head, the coat
sleeves drawn tight to expose the shirt sleeves, the hands spread and
clutching. He screamed, “Gimme that meat ax!’^

277

And the crowd roai'ed.

He brought both hands slowly down, for silence.

Then said, “Your will is my strength/'

And after a moment of silence said, “Your need is my justice/*

Then, “That is all/'

He turned and w’-alked slowly back into the tall doorway of the
Capitol, into the darkness there, and disappeared. The roar was
swelling and heaving in the air now, louder than ever, and I felt it
inside of me, too, swelling like blood and victory. 1 stared into the
darkness of the great doorway of the Capitol, where he had gone,
while the roar kept on.

Anne Stanton was tugging at my arm. She asked me, “Does he
mean that. Jack?"

“Hell," I said, and heard the savage tone in my own voice, “hell,
how the hell do I know?"

Adam Stanton's lip curled and he said, “Justicel He used that
word."

And suddenly, for the flicker of an instant, I hated Adam Stan-

^iOn.

I told them I had to go, which was true, and worked my way
around through the edge of the crowd, to the police cordon. Then
I went around to the back of the Capitol, where I joined the Boss.

Late that night, back at the Mansion, after he had thrown Tiny
and his rabble out of the study, I asked him the question. I asked,
“Did you mean what you said?"

Propped back on the big leather couch, he stared at me, and de*
manded, “What?"

“What you said," I replied, “tonight. You said your strength was
their will. You said your justice was their need. All of that."

He kept on staring at me, his eyes bulging, his stare grappling
and probing into me.

“You said that," I said.

“God damn it,” he exclaimed, violently, still staring at me, “God
damn it~~" he clenched his right fist and struck himself twice on the
chest— “God damn it, there's something inside you— there's some-
thing inside you—”

He left the words hanging there. He turned his eyes from me and
stared moodily into the fire. I didn't press my question.

Well, that was how it had been when I asked him a question, a
long time back. Now I had a new question to ask him: If he be-
lieved that you had to make the good out of the bad because there
wasn't anything else to make it out of, why did he stir up such a
fuss about keeping Tiny's hands off the Willie Stark Hospital?

278

There was another little question. One I would have to ask Anne
Stanton. It had come to me that night down on the pier at the
mist-streaked river when Anne said that she had gone up to Adam
Stanton’s apartment “to talk to him about it’*— about the offer of
the directorship of the Willie Stark Hospital. She had said that to
me, and at the moment, it had disturbed like an itch that comes
when your hands are full and you can’t scratch. I hadn't, in the
press of the moment, defined what was disturbing, what was the
question. I had simply pushed the whole pot to the back of the stove
and left it to simmer. And there it simmered for weeks. But one
day, ail at once, it boiled over and I knew what the question was:
How had Anne Stanton known about the hospital offer?

One thing was a cinch. I hadn’t told her.

Perhaps Adam had told her, and then she had gone up there “to
talk to him about it.” So I went to see Adam, who was furiously
deep in work, his usual practice and teaching, and in addition, the
work on the hospital plans, who hadn’t been able, he said, to touch
the piano in almost a month, whose eyes fixed on me glacially out
of a face now thin from sleeplessness, and who treated me with a
courtesy too chromium-plated to be given to the friend of your
youth. It took some doing, on my part, in the face of that courtesy,
to get my nerve up to ask him the question. But I finally asked it I
said, “Adam, that first time Anne came up to talk to you about—
about the job— you know, the hospital— had you told—”

And he said, with a voice like a scalpel, “I don’t want to dis-
cuss it.”

But I had to know. So I said, “Had you told her about the
proposition?”

“No,” he said, “and I said I didn’t want to discuss it.”

“O.K.,” I heard myself saying, in a fiat voice which wasn’t quite
my own. “O.K.”

He looked sharply at me, then rose from his chair and took a step
toward me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry. Jack. I’m on edge.” He
shook his head slightly like a man trying to shake the fog of sleep
out. “Not been getting enough shut-eye,” he said. He took another
step to me— I was leaning against the mantel— and looked into my
face again and laid his hand on my arm, saying, “I’m really sorry.
Jack— talking that way— but I didn’t tell Anne anything— and I’m
sorry.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“I’ll forget it,” he agreed, smiling wintrily, tapping my arm, “if
you will.”

“Sure,” I said, “sure, I’ll forget it. Yeah, I’ll forget it. It didn’t

279

amount to anything an)’way. Who told her. I guess I told her my-
self. It just slipped my mind tliat— ”

“I mean forget about the way I acted/’ he corrected me, ‘‘blowing
off the way I did.”

“Oh,” I said, “oh, that. Sure, I’ll forget it.”

Then he was peering into my face, with a question darkening his
eyes. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “What did you
want to know for?”

“Nothing,” I replied, “nothing. Just idle curiosity. But I recollect
now. I told her myself. Yeah, and I guess maybe I shouldn’t. I didn’t
mean to get her into it. Just let it slip. I didn’t mean to cause any
ruckus. I didn’t think—” And all the while that cold, unloving part
of the mind— that maiden aunt, that washroom mirror the drunk
stares into, that still small voice, that maggot in the cheese of your
self-esteem, that commentator on the ether nightmare, that death’s-
head of lipless rationality at your every feast— all that while that
part of the mind was saying: You're making it worse, your lying is
just making it worse, can't you shut up, you blabbermouth!

And Adam, with whitening face, was saying, “There wasn’t any
ruckus. As you call it.”

But I couldn’t stop, as when your car comes to the glare ice over
the brow of the hill and hits it before you can get on the brake, and
you feel the beautiful free glide and spin of the skid and almost
burst out laughing, it is so fine and free, like boyhood, I was saying,
“—not any ruckus exactly— just I’m sorry I sicked her on you— I
didn’t want to cause any trouble— it was just that—”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” he said, and the jaw snapped shut,
and he swung from me and went to stand on the other side of the
room, very stiff and military.

So I took my leave, and the chromium-plated courtesy was so
bright and cold that my, “Be seeing you, boy,” stuck in my throat,
like old corn bread.

But he hadn’t told Anne Stanton. And I hadn’t told her. Who
had told her? And at that point I could see no answer except that
there had been some loose talk, some leak, and the news had got
around, I guess I took that answer— if I really took it— because it was
the easiest answer for me to take. But I knew, deep down, that the
Boss wasn’t given to loose talk except when he wanted to talk loose,
and he would have known that one sure way to ruin the chance ox
ever getting Adam Stanton would be to let the gossip mill start
grinding on the topic. I knew that all right, but my mind just closed
up like a clam when that shadow came floating over. A clam has to
live, hasn’t it?

280

But I did find out who had told Anne Stanton.

It was a beautiful morning in middle May, and just that morn
ing, at that hour, about nine-thirty, there was still some last touch
of spring— by that time you had almost forgotten there had been a
spring— a kind of milkiness in the air, and way off yonder, from my
window, I could see a little white haze on the river, milky too. The
season was like the fine big-breasted daughter of some poor spavined
share-cropper, a girl popping her calico but still having a waist,
with pink cheeks and bright eyes and just a little perspiration at
the edge of her tow hair (which would be platinum blond in some
circles), but you see her and know that before long she will be a bag
of bone and gristle with a hag face like a rusted brush hook. But
she looks good enough to scare you now, if you really look at her,
and that morning the season still had that look and feel even if you
did know that by the end of June everything would be bone and
gristle and hag face and a sweat-sticky sheet to wake up on and a
taste in your mouth like old brass. But now the leaves on the trees
hung down thick and fleshy and had not begun to curl yet. I could
look down from my office window on the great bolls and tufts and
swollen globes of green which were the trees of the Capitol grounds
seen from the height of my window, and think of the deep inner
maze ol green in one of the big trees and of the hollow shadowy
chambers near the trunk, where maybe a big cantankerous jay
would be perched for a moment like a barbarous potentate staring
with black, glittering, beady eyes into the green tangle. Then he
would dive soundlessly off the bough and break through the green
screen and be gone into the bright sunshine where suddenly he
would be screaming his damned head off. I could look down and
think of myself inside that hollow inner chamber, in the aqueous
green light, inside the great globe of the tree, and not even a jay-
bird in there with me now, for he had gone, and no chance of seeing
anything beyond the green leaves, they were so thick, ana no sound
except, way off, the faint mumble of traffic, like the ocean chewing
its gums.

It was a fine, peaceful, beautiful thought and I took my eyes off
the green below and lay back in my swivel chair, with my heels on
the desk, and shut my eyes and thought of swooping down and
bursting through the green to the sudden green quietness inside. I
lay back with my eyes closed and listened to the electric fan, which
was humming like a dream, and could almost feel the wonderful
swoop and then the poise inside. It was a fine idea. If you had
wings.

Then I heard the racket outside in the reception room, and

281

opened my eyes. Somebody had slammed a door. Then I caught the
whir of a passage and Sadie Burke swung into my ken, making a
great curve through my open door, and, all in one motion, slam-
ming it behind her and charging on in my direction. She stood in
front of my desk and fought for air enough to say what she had to
say.

It was just like old times. I hadn’t seen her worked up that much
since the morning when she had found out about the Nordic
Nymph who had skated her way into the Boss’s bed up in Chicago
a long time back. That morning she had exploded out of the Boss’s
door, and had described a parabola into my office, with her black
chopped-off hair wild and her face like a riddled plaster-of-Paris
mask of Medusa except for the hot bituminous eyes, which were in
full blaze with a bellow^s pumping the flame.

Well, since that morning there had, no doubt, been plenty of
occasions when Sadie and the Boss had not seen exactly eye to eye.
The Boss had had everything from the Nordic Nymph to the house-
hold-hints columnist on the ChroJiicle in his life, and Sadie hadn’t
been exactly condoning— for Sadie did not have a condoning nature
—but a peculiar accommodation had finally been reached. “Damn
him,” Sadie had said to me, “let him have his sluts, let him have
them. But he’ll always come back to me. He knows he can’t get
along without me. He knows he can’t.” And she had added grimly,
“And he better not try.” So, with her fury and her God’damns and
her satire and her tongue-lashings— and she had a tongue like a
cat-o’-nine-tails— and even with her rare bursts of dry-eyed grief, she
seemed to take a kind of pleasure, tvry and twisted enough God
knows, in watching the development of the pattern in each new-old
case, in watching the slut get bounced and the Boss come back to
stand before her, grinning and heavy and sure and patient, to take
his tongue-lashing. A long time back she herself had probably
ceased to believe in the tongue-lashing or even to think what she
was saying. The juicy epithets had long since lost their fine savor
and a strident mechanical quality had crept into the rendering of
the scene. Like a stuck phonograph record or a chicken-hungry
preacher getting over the doxology. The words came but her mind
wasn’t on them.

But it was different that fine May morning. It was like old times,
all right, with her bosom heaving and the needle of the steam gauge
pricking deep into the red on the dial. Then she blew the plug.

“He’s done it,” she blew, “he’s done it again— and I swear—”

“Done what?” I demanded, though I knew perfectly well what he
had done. He had another slut.

282

‘‘He’s two-timing me/’ she said.

I lay back in my swivel chair and looked at her. The bright morn*
ing light was hitting her face square and without pity, but the eyes
were magnificent.

“The bastard,” she said, “he’s two-timing me!”

“Now, Sadie,” I said, lying back in my chair and sighting at her
over the toes of my shoes crossed on the desk, “we went into that
arithmetic a long time back. He’s not two-timing you. He's two-
timing Lucy. He may be one-timing you, or four-timing you. But it
can’t be two-timing.” I was watching her eyes, and just saying that
to see if it was possible to put a little more snap into them. It was.

For she said, “You—you— ” Then words failed her.

“Me what?” I defended myself.

“You— you and your high-toned friends— what do they know—
what do they know about anything— and you’ve got to mix them in.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I may not be high-toned and maybe I did live in a shack but it
hadn’t been for me he wouldn’t be Governor this minute and he
knows it and she better not get gay, for high-toned or not. I’ll show
her. By God, I’ll show her!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” she aflSrmed, and leaned
over the desk top toward me, shaking her finger at me, “and you sit
there and smile that way and think you are so high-toned. If you
were a man you’d get up and go in there and knock hell out of him.
I thought she was yours. Or maybe he’s fixed you up, too. Maybe
he’s fixed you up like he fixed up that doctor.” She leaned farther
toward me. “Maybe he’s making you director of a hospital. Yeah,
what’s he making you director of?”

Under the flood of words and the savage finger and the snapping
eyes, I jerked myself forward, dropped my feet to the floor with a
crash, and lunged up to stand before her, while the blood pounded
in my head to make me dizzy, as it does when you rise suddenly,
and little red flecks danced before me and the words kept on. Then
the words stopped on her question.

“Are you saying,” I began firmly, “that— that— ” I had been about
to pronounce the name of Anne Stanton, for the name itself had
been quite clearly in my mind, as though spelled out on a billboard,
but all at once the name stuck in my throat and with surprise I dis-
covered that I could not say it. So I continued, “—that she— she— ”

But Sadie Burke was looking straight into my mind— at least, I
had that feeling— and quick as a boxer she jabbed that name at me,
“Yeah, she, she, that Stanton girl, Anne Stanton!”

283

I looked at Sadie in the face for a moment and felt so sorry for
her I could a'y. That was what surprised me. I felt so sorry for
Sadie. Then I didn’t feel anything. I didn't even feel sorry for ny^
self. I felt as wooden as a wooden Indian, and I remember being
surprised to discover that my legs worked perfectly even if they were
wooden, and were walking directly toward the hatrack, where my
right arm, e'ven if it was wooden, reached out to pick up the old
Panama which hung there and put it on my head, and my legs then
walked straight out the door and across the long reception room
over the carpet which was deep and soft as the turf of a shaven
lawn in spring and walked on out the door across the ringing
marble slabs.

And out into a world which seemed bigger than it had ever
seemed before. It seemed forever down the length of white, sun-
glittering concrete which curled and swooped among the bronze
statues and brilliant flower beds shaped like stars and crescents, and
forever across the green lawn to the great swollen bulbs of green
which were the trees, and forever up into tlie sky, where the sun
poured down billows and surges of heat like crystalline lava to en-
gulf you, for the last breath of spring was gone now and gone for
good, the fine, big-breasted girl popping the calico, with the face
like peaches and cream and the tiny, dewy drop of perspiration at
the edge of the tow head of hair, she was gone for good, too, and
everything from now on out was bone and gristle and the hag face
like a rusty brush hook, and green scum on the shrunk pool around
which the exposed earth cracks and scales like a gray scab.

It was a source of perpetual surprise to find how well the legs
worked carrying me down the white concrete of the drive, and how
even if it was forever down the drive and past the trees I was finally
past them and moving down the street as though sustained in a
runnel of crystalline lava. I looked with the greatest curiosity at the
faces which I saw but found nothing beautiful or remarkable in
them and was not assured of their reality. For it takes the greatest
effort to believe in their reality and to believe in their reality you
must believe in your own, but to believe in your own you must be-
lieve in theirs, but to believe m theirs you must believe in your
own— one-two, one-two, one-two, like feet marching. But if you have
no feet to march with. Or if they are wooden. But I looked down at
them and they were marching, one-two, one-two.

They marched a long time. But at the end of forever they
brought me to a door. Then the door opened, and there, with the
cool, white-shadowy room behind her, wearing a pale-blue, cool-
crisp linen dress, her bare white long small arms hanging straight

284

down against the pale blue, was Anne Stanton. I knew that it was
Anne Stanton, though I had not looked into her face. I had looked
into the other faces— all the faces I had met— I had looked into them
ndth the greatest frankness and curiosity. But now I did not loot
into hers.

Then I looked into her face. She met my gaze quite steadily. I did
not say anything. And I did not need to. For, looking at me, she
slowly nodded.

Chapter Seven

AFTER my visit to Anne Stanton’s apartment that morning in late
May, I was out of town for a while, about eight days. I left her
apartment that morning and went down to the bank and drew out
some money and got my car out of the garage and packed a bag and
was headed out. I was headed out down a long bone-white road,
straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering
in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was
doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool
which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon.
Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west.
So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle
to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all
plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and
the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the
letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you
look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is
where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide
of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in
them-diar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It
is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

It was just where I went.

The second day I was in Texas. I was traveling through the part
where the flat-footed, bilious, frog-sticker-toting Baptist biscuit-eat-
ers live. Then I was traveling through the part where the crook-
legged, high-heeled, gun-wearing, spick-killing, callous-rumped sons
of the range live and crowd the drugstore on Saturday night and
then all go round the corner to see episode three of “Vengeance on
Vinegar Creek,” starring Gene Autry as Borax Pete. But over both
parts, the sky was tall hot brass by day and black velvet by night,
and Coca Cola is all a man needs to live on. Then I was traveling
through New Mexico, which is a land of total and magnificent
emptiness with a little white filling station flung down on the sand

286

like a sun-bleached cow skull by the trail, with far to the north a
valiant remnant of the heroes of the Battle of Montmartre in a last
bivouac wearing huaraches and hammered silver and trying to
strike up conversations with Hopis on street corners. Then Arizona,
which is grandeur and the slow incredulous stare of sheep, until you
hit the Mojave. You cross the Mojave at night and even at night
your breath rasps your gullet as though you were a sword swallower
who had got hold of a hack-saw blade by mistake, and in the dai'k-
ness the hunched rock and towering cactus loom at you with the
shapes of a visceral, Freudian nightmare.

Then California.

Then Long Beach, which is the essence of California. I know be-
cause I have never seen any of California except Long Beach and
so am not distracted by competing claims. I was in Long Beach
thirty-six hours, and spent all of that time in a hotel room, except
for forty minutes in a barbershop off the lobby of the hotel.

I had had a puncture in the morning and so didn’t hit Long
Beach till about evening. I drank a milk shake, bought a bottle of
bourbon, and went up to my room. I hadn’t had a drop the whole
trip. I hadn’t wanted a drop. I hadn’t wanted anything, except the
hum of the motor and the lull of the car and I had had that. But
now I knew that if I didn’t drink that bourbon, as soon as I shut
my eyes to go to sleep the whole hot and heaving continent would
begin charging at me out of the dark. So I took some, took a bath,
and then lay on the bed, with my light off, watching the neon sign
across the street flare on and off to the time of my heartbeat, and
drinking out of the bottle, which, between times, I set on the floor
by the bed.

I got a good sleep out of it. I didn’t wake up till noon the next
day. Then I had breakfast sent up and a pile of newspapers, for it
was Sunday. I read the papers, which proved that California was
just like any place else, or wanted to think the same things about
itself, and then I listened to the radio till the neon sign began to
flare on and off again to the time of my heartbeat, and then I or-
dered up some food, ate it, and put myself to sleep again.

The next morning I headed back.

I was headed back and was no longer remembering the things
which I had remembered coming out.

For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so
much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which
was important, but the flow, the texture of the events, for meaning
is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise
we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event

287

Itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion
which is important. And I was moving. I was moving West at
seventy-five miles an hour, through a blur of million-dollar land-
scape and heroic history, and I was moving back tlirough time into
my memory. They say the drowning man relives his life as he
drowns. Well, I was not drowing in water, but I was drowning m
West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black
Velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body
to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless
ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.

To the hum and lull of the car the past unrolled in my head like
a film. It was like a showing of a family movie, the kind the adver-
tisements tell you to keep so that you will have a record of the day
Susie took her first little toddle and the day Johnny went off to
kindergarten and the day you went up Pike’s Peak and the day of
the picnic on the old home farm and the day you were made chief
sales manager and bought your first Buick. The picture on the ad-
vertisement always shows a dignified, gray-haired, kindly old gent,
the kind you find on the whisky ad (or a gray-haired, kindly, sweet-
faced old biddy), looking at the home movie and dreaming gently
back over the years. Well, I was not gray-haired or dignified or
kindly or sweet-faced, but I did have a showing of my home movie
and dreamed gently back over the years. Therefore, if you have any
home movies, I earnestly advise you to burn them and to be bap-
tized to get born again.

I dreamed gently back over the years. And the stocky man with
the black coat and spectacles leaned over me as I sat with my
colored crayons on the rug before the fire and he held me the candy
and said, ‘‘Just one bite, now, for supper’s almost ready.” And the
woman with the pale hair and the blue eyes and the famished
cheeks leaned over me and kissed me good night and left the sweet
smell in the dark after the light was out. And Judge Irwin leaned
at me in the gray dawn light, saying, “You ought to have led that
duck more. Jack. You got to lead a duck, son.” And Count Covelli
sat straight in an expensive chair in the long white room and smiled
from under his clipped black mustache and in one hand— -the small-
ish, strong hand which could make a man wince at its clasp— held
the glass and with the other stroked the big cat on his knee. And
there was the Young Executive with his hair laid on his round skull
like taffy. And Adam Stanton and I drifted in the yawl, far out,
while the white sails hung limp in the breathless air and the sea was
like hot glass and the sun burned like a barn on the western
horizon. And always there was Anne Stanton.

288

Little girls wear white dresses with skirts that flare out to show
their funny little knees, and they wear round-toed black patent-
leather slippers held by a one-button strap, and their w^hite socks
are held up by a dab of soap, and their hair hangs down the back
in a braid with a blue ribbon on it. That was Anne Stanton and it
was Sunday and she was going to church to sit still as a mouse and
rub her tonguetip pensively at the place where she had just lost the
tooth. And little girls sit on hassocks and lean tlieir cheeks pensively
against the dear father’s knee while his hand toys with the silken
locks and his voice reads beautiful words. That was Anne Stanton.
And little girls are fraidy-cats and try the surf with one toe that first
day in spring, and when the surf makes a surprising leap and
splashes their thighs with the tingle and cold they squeal and jump
up and down on thin little legs like stilts. That was Anne Stanton.
Little girls get a smudge of soot on the end of the nose when they
roast wieners over the campfire and you— for you are a big boy and
do not get soot on your nose— point your finger and sing, '‘Dirty-
Face, Dirty-Face, you are so dirty you are a disgrace!” And then one
day when you sing it, the little girl doesn’t say a thing back the
way she always had, but turns her big eyes on you, out of the thin
little smooth face, and her lips quiver an instant so that you think
she might cry even though she is too big for that now, and as the
eyes keep fixed on you, the grin dries up on your face and you turn
quickly away and pretend to be getting some more wood. That was
Anne Stanton.

All the bright days by the water with the gulls flashing high were
Anne Stanton. But I didn’t know it. And all the not bright days
with the eaves dripping or the squall driving in from the sea and
with the fire on the hearth were Anne Stanton, too. But I didn’t
know that, either. Then there came a time when the nights were
Anne Stanton. But I knew that.

That began the summer when I was twenty-one and Anne Stan-
ton was seventeen. I was back from the University for vacation and
I was a grown man who had been around. I got back from the Uni-
versity late in the afternoon, had a quick swim, ate my dinner, and
bolted off to the Stanton house to see Adam. I saw him sitting out
on the gallery reading a book (Gibbon, I remember) in the long
twilight. And I saw Anne. I was sitting in the swing with Adam,
when she came out the door. I looked at her and knew that It had
been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas
when she had been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss
Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girl wearing
round-toed, black patent-leather, fiat-heeled slippers held on by a

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one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soap. She was
w^earing a %vhite linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness
of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but
suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses
sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of
her neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was
smiling at me with a smile which I had knowm all my life but which
was entirely new, and saying, “Hello, Jack,*' while I held her strong
narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come.

It had come. And it was not like any summer which ever had
been or was to be again. During the day I would be with Adam a
lot, like always, and a lot of the time she would tag along, for that
was the way it had been before, she’d tag along for she and Adam
were very close. That summer Adam and I w^ould play tennis in the
early morning before the sun got high and hot, and she would come
to the court with us and sit in the dappled shade of the mimosas
and myrtles and watch Adam beat the tar out of me as usual and
laugh like bird song and mountain brooks when I got my feet
tangled up in my own racket. Then she might play me some, for
she was pretty good and I was pretty bad. She was pretty good, all
right, for a light-built girl, and had a lot of power in those small
round arms, which flashed in the morning sun like wings. She was
fast on her feet, too, and there would be the whipping skirt like a
dancer’s, and the flicker of white shoes. But of those mornings I
chiefly remember her far over yonder across the court, tiptoe, poised
to serve, at the moment when the racket is back of her ribbon-
bound head, with the pull of the arm lifting the right breast, and
the left hand, from which the ball has just risen, still up, as though
to pluck something out of the air, the face lifted gravely and in-
tensely to the bright light and the wide sky and the absolute little
white ball hung there like the spinning world in the middle of
brilliance. Well, that is the classic pose, and it is too bad the Greeks
didn’t play tennis, for if they had played tennis they would have
put Anne Stanton on a Greek vase. But on second thought, I guess
they would not have done it. That is the moment which, for all its
poise, is too airy, too tiptoe, too keyed up. It is the moment just be^
fore the stroke, before die explosion, and the Greeks didn’t put that
kind of moment on a vase. So that moment is not on a vase in a
museum, but is inside my head, where nobody else can see it but
me. For it was the moment before the explosion, and it did explode.
The racket smacked and the sheep gut whanged and the white ball
came steaming across at me, and I missed it as like as not, and the
game was over, and the set was over, and we all went home, through

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the motionless heat, for the dew was off the grass now and the morn-
ing land breeze had died.

But back then there was always the afternoon. In the afternoon
we always went swimming, or sailing and then swimming afterward,
all three of us, and sometimes some of the other boys and girls
whose folks lived down the Row from the Landing or who were
visiting there. Then after dinner we would get together again and
sit in the shadow on their gallery or mine, or go to a movie, or take
a moonlight swim. But one night when I went down, Adam wasn't
there—he had had to drive his father somewhere— and so I asked
Anne to go down to the Landing to a movie. On the way back, we
stopped the car— I had tlie roadster, for my mother had gone off
somewhere with a gang in her big one— and looked at the moon-
light on the bay beyond Hardin Point. The moonlight lay on the
slightly ruffling water like a swath of brilliant white, cold fire. You
expected to see that white fire start eating out over the whole ocean
the way fire in a sage field spreads. But it lay there glittering and
flickering in a broad nervous swath reaching out yonder to the
bright horizon blur.

We sat there in the car, arguing about the movie we had just seen
and looking up the swath of light. Then the talking died away. She
had slid down a little in the seat, with her head lying on the top of
the back cushion so that now she wasn't looking out toward the
horizon but up into the sky— for the top of the roadster was down—
with the moonlight pouring down on her face to make it look
smooth as marble. I slid down a little, too, and looked up at the
sky, and the moonlight poured down over my face, such as it was.
I kept thinking that now in a minute I would reach over and take
hold. I stole a look sidewise and saw how her face was smooth as
marble in the moonlight. And how her hands lay supine on her lap,
the fingers curling a little as though to receive a gift. It would be
perfectly easy to reach over and take her hand and get started and
see where we wound up. For I was thinking in language like that,
the stale impersonal language of the College Boy who thinks he's
such a God-damned big man.

But I didn't reach over. It seemed a thousand miles across that
little patch of leather to where she lay with her head back and her
hands in her lap and the moonlight over her face. I didn't know
why I didn't reach over. I kept assuring myself that I wasn't timid,
wasn't afraid, I said to myself, hell, she was just a kid, what the hell
was I hanging back for, all she could do would be to get sore and I
could stop if she got sore. Hell, I told myself, she wouldn't get sore
anyway, she knew what was up, she knew you didn't sit in parked

291

cars with bo)s to play checkers in the moonlight, and she had prob-
ably been worked over plenty, somebody had probably run the
scales on her piano. I played with that thought a second, and then
all at once I was both hot and angry. I started up in the seat, a sud-
den tumult of something in my chest. ‘"Anne,” I said, “Anne—’’ and
didn’t know what I "was going to say.

She turned her face toward me, not lifting her head from the
back of the seat, just roiling it on the leather cushion. She lifted a
finger to her lip, and said, “Sh, sh!” Then she took the finger away,
and smiled directly and simply across the thousand miles of leather
cushion between us.

I sank back. We lay there for quite a time, with that space be-
tween us, looking up at the moon-drenched sky and hearing the
faintest whisper as the water lipped the shingle along the point.
The longer we lay there, the bigger the sky seemed. After a long
while I stole another sidewise look at Anne. Her eyes were closed,
and when I thought that she wasn’t looking up into that expanding
sky, too, I suddenly felt alone and abandoned. But she opened her
eyes— I was spying and saw that happen— and again was looking up
into the sky. I lay there and looked up and didn’t think of anything
in the world.

Back then there was a train that passed the crossing just out of
Burden’s Landing at eleven-forty-five at night. The train always
blew for the crossing. It blew that night, and I knew that it was
eleven-forty-five. And time to go. So I sat up, touched the starter,
turned the car around, and headed home. We hadn’t said a word
and we didn’t say a word, until we pulled up in front of the Stanton
house. Then Anne slipped out of the car, quick as a wink, poised
there a moment on the shell drive, said, “Good night. Jack/’ in a
low voice and -with a last flicker of the smile she had smiled at me
across the thousand miles of leather cushion two hours back, and
ran up the steps of her house, light as a bird. All of this before I had
half a chance to begin to collect myself.

I gaped at the blackness of the doorway back in the shadow of
the gallery— she hadn’t turned on a light when she entered— and
listened hard as though I were waiting for a signal. But there wasn’t
a sound except that nameless stir of the night which comes even
when there isn’t a breath of wind and you are too far from the
beach to get the whisper and riffle that is always there, even when
the sea is quietest.

Then, after a few minutes, I switched on the motor again, and
exploded off the Stanton property with a grind of tires that must
have scattered tlie shells of the drive like spray. On the road down

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the Row I just pushed the accelerator to the floor board and let all
those drowsy bastards up in those white houses have the works. I
was letting that cutout snatch them bolt upright in bed like a can-
non. I roared on out about ten miles till I hit the pine woods where
there wasn’t anybody to snatch up except hoot owls and some stray
malarial squatter who would be lying off yonder as God’s gift to the
anopheles in his shack on the edge of the tidelands. So I turned the
roadster around and eased on back with the throttle cut down to
nothing, just drifting along in the roadster, lying back on the
leather, like a boat drifting on a slow current.

At home, as soon as I lay back on my bed, I suddenly remem-
bered—I didn’t remember, I saw— Anne’s face lying back, with the
eyes closed and the moonlight pouring over it, and I remembered
that day of the picnic long back-the day when we had swum out in
the bay, under the storm clouds, when she had floated on the water,
her face turned up to the purple-green darkening sky, her eyes
closed, and the white gull passing over, very high. I hadn’t thought
of that since it happened, I guess, or if I had thought of it, it hadn’t
meant a thing, but all at once, lying there, I had the feeling of being
on the teetering verge of a most tremendous discovery. I saw that
the moment tonight was just an extension of the moment long back,
on the picnic, that this moment tonight had been in that moment
all the time, and I hadn’t known it, I had dropped it aside or
thrown it away, but it had been like a seed you throw away to find,
when you come back that way again, that the plant is tail and
covered with bloom, or it had been like a little dirt-colored stick
you throw into the fire with the other trash, but the thing is dyna-
mite and there is an awful bang.

There was an awful bang. I popped up in bed like those drowsy
bastards when I gave them the cutout. But this was more so. I sat
up in bed and was absolutely filled with rapture. It wasn’t like any-
thing that had ever happened to me. It stopped my breath and 1
could feel my veins swelling to burst as when you take your deepest
dive and think you’ll never come up. I felt that I was right on the
verge of knowing the real and absolute truth about everything. Just
one instant and I would know it. Then I got my breath. “Jesus,” I
said out loud, “JesusI” I stretched my arms out as wide as I could,
as though I could grab the whole empty air.

Then I thought of the image of the face on the water, under the
purple-green darkening sky, with the white gull flying over. It was
almost a shock to remember that, to have the image come back, for
the thing which had, apparently, provoked the rapture had itself
been lost and forgotten in the rapture which had exploded out into

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the wfiole universe. An}nvay, now I saw the image again, and all at
once the rapture was gone, and I experienced a great tenderness,
a tenderness shot through and veined with sadness, as though
the tenderness were the very flesh o£ my body and the sadness the
veins and ner\^es of it. That sounds absurd, but that was the way it
was. And for a fact.

Then I thought, quite objectively as though I were observing the
symptoms of a total stranger: You are in love.

I was, for a moment, bemused by that thought. That I was in
love. And that it wasn't a bit like the way I had thought it would
be. I was surprised, and a little bit awed by the fact, like a person
who learns unexpectedly that he has inherited a million dollars, all
lying up there in the bank for him to draw on, or who learns that
the little stitch in the side is cancer and that he is carrying around
inside himself that mysterious, apocalyptic, burgeoning thing which
is part of himself but is, at the same time, not part of himself but
the enemy. I got out of bed, very carefully, handling myself with
awe-struck care as though I were a basket of eggs, and went to the
window and stared out into the moon-drenched night.

So the College Boy, who had thought he was such a God-damned
big man and knew everything and who had, that evening, looked
across the little space of leather cushion and had thought the stale
impersonal thoughts almost as a kind of duty to the definition of
what he considered himself to be— so he hadn't reached out his hand
across that little space and now as a result of that fact stood buck-
naked in a shadowy room before an open window and stared out
into enormous moon-soaked, sea-glittering night while off yonder
in the myrtle hedge a mocking bird hysterically commented on the
total beauty and justice of the universe.

That was how the nights became Anne Stanton, too. For that
night in the roadster, Anne Stanton had done her trick very well. It
was a wordless and handless trick, but it didn't need words or
hands. She had lolied her head on the leather seat back, and
touched her finger to her lips to say, “Sh, sh," and smiled. And had
sunk her harpoon deeper than ever. Queequeg sunk it, through four
feet of blubber to the very quick, but I hadn't really known it until
the line played out and the barb jerked in the red meat which was
the Me inside of all the blubber of what I had thought I was. And
might continue to think I was.

Anne Stanton was the nights, all right. And the days, too, but in
the days she was not the total substance, rather the flavor, the dis-
tillate, the climate, the breath, without which the rest wouldn't be
anything at all. There would be Adam with us often, and some*

294

times the other people, with books, sandwiches, and a blanket in
the pine woods, on the beach, at the tennis courts, on the shadowy
gallery with a phonograph going, in the boat, at the movies. But
sometimes she would let her book slide down to the blanket and lie
back staring up into the high arch and tangle of the pine boughs,
and I would begin to spy on her until, in a minute, it would be as
though Adam weren't there. Or on tlie gallery she would be laugh-
ing and jabbering with all the others while the phonograph worked
away, and then I would catch sight of her suddenly still and pen-
sive, just for a moment it might be, with her eyes fixed ofiE beyond
the gallery and the yard, and again, just for that moment, it would
be as though Adam and the others weren't there.

Or we would go down to the hotel, where there was a high-dive
tower, a good high one because the hotel was pretty swank and had
exhibitions and races there now and then. Anne was crazy about
diving that summer. She would go up high— she worked up higher
and higher, day by day— and stand up there in the sunlight poised
there at the very verge. Then, when she lifted her arms, I would
feel that something was about to snap in me. Then down she would
fly, a beautiful swan dive, with her arms wide to emphasize her trim
breasts and her narrow back arched and her long legs close and
sweet together. She would come flying down in the sunlight, and as
I watched her it would be as though nobody else were there. I
would hold my breath till whatever was going to snap inside me
snapped. Then she would knife into the water, and her twin heels
would draw through the wreath of ripple and the flicker of spray,
and be gone. Adam sometimes got sore as hell at her for going up
so high. ‘'Oh, Adam,” she'd say, “oh, Adam, itll be all right, and it's
wonderful!'* And up the ladder she'd go. Up and plunge. Up and
plunge. Up and plunge. Over and over again. I used to wonder
what her face was like just at the woment when she entered the
water. What expression was on it.

But sometimes in the day we would be quite literally alone. Some-
times she and I would slip off and go to the pine woods and walk
on the soundless matting of needles, holding hands. And then there
was a little diving float, with just a single low board, anchored
about a hundred yards off the beach, near the Stanton slip. Some-
times we would swim out there when other people were pranking
on the beach, or when nobody was there, and lie flat on our backs
on the float, with our eyes closed, and just the fingertips touching
and tingling as though they were peeled skinless with the nerves
laid bare, so that every bit of my being was focused there.

At night we were alone pretty often. It had always been Adam

295

and I, wth Anne tagging along, and then, ail at once, it was Anne
and I, and Adam tagging along or, more likely, back up at his house
reading Gibbon or Tacitus, for he was great on Rome back then.
The change came more easily than I had expected. The day after
that night in the roadster I pia}ed tennis with them in the morning
as usual, and in the afternoon went swimming with them. I found
myself watching Anne all the time, but that was the only difference.
I couldn't see any change in her. I began to doubt that anything had
happened, that I had even taken her to the movie the night before.
But I had to see her that night.

I went up to them house just about dusk. She was on the gallery,
in the swing. Adam, it turned out, was upstairs writing a letter he
had to get off. He would be down in a few minutes, she said. It was
something for their father, she said. I didn’t sit down, though she
asked me. I stood at the top of the steps, very uneasy, just inside the
screen door, trying to think up what I would say. Then I blurted
out, “Let’s go out on the slip, let’s walk.” And added lamely, “Till
Adam comes down.”

Without a word, she got up, came to me, gave me her hand— that
was her own doing and the fact set blaring and bonging all the fire
bells and calliopes and burglar alarms in my system— and walked
down the steps with me, down the path, across the road, and toward
the slip. We stayed out on the slip a long time. Adam could have
written a dozen letters in that time. But nothing happened out on
the slip, except that we sat on the end, our feet dangling over, and
held hands, and looked over the bay.

On the side of the road toward the bay, just opposite the Stanton
house, there was a big thicket of myrtle. \^en we got there, going
hand in hand on our way back to the house, I stopped there in the
protection of the shadow, drew her to me a little clumsily and
abruptly, I guess, for I had had to key myself up to the act, plotting
it all the way up the slip— and kissed her. She didn’t put up any
protest when I did it, just letting her arms hang limp, but she didn’t
return the kiss, just taking it submissively like a good little girl
doing what she’s told. I looked her in the face, after the kiss, and
its smoothness was shaded by a reflective, inward expression, the
kind of expression you see sometimes on a child’s face when it is
trying to decide whether or not it likes a new food it has just tasted.
And I thought, my God, she probably hadn’t been kissed before,
even if she was seventeen, or almost, and I almost burst out laugh-
ing, the expression on her face was so funny and I was so happy. So
I kissed her again. This time she returned the kiss, timidly and
tentatively, but she returned it. “Anne,"’ I said, with my heart burst-

296

ing and my head reeling, “Anne, I love you, I’m crazy about you.”

She was clutching my coat, a hand on each side of my chest, just
under the shoulder, crumpling up the seersucker and hanging on,
with her head, a little to one side and down, pressed weakly against
me, as though she were asking pardon for a piece of misbehavior.
She didn’t answer what I said, and when I tried to lift her face up,
she pressed it harder against me and clutched the seersucker tighter.
So I stood there and ran my hand over her hair and breathed in the
clean odor it had.

Then, after a while which may have been long or short, she dis-
engaged herself from me, and stepped back. “Adam-” she said,
“he’s waiting— we’ve got to go.”

I followed her across the road and into the gateway of the Stan-
ton drive. A few paces up the drive she hesitated for me to come
abreast of her. Then she took my hand, and that way, hand in
hand, we proceeded toward the gallery where back in the shadow
Adam would be sitting.

Yes, he was sitting there, for I caught the glow of a cigarette, the
sudden intensification as the smoker took a deep pull, and then the
fading.

Still holding my hand, tighter now as though executing a deci-
sion, she mounted the steps of the gallery, opened the screen with
her free hand, and entered, drawing me behind her. We stood there
for a moment, hand in hand. Then she said, “Hello, Adam,” and I
said, “Hello, Adam.”

“Hello,” he said.

We continued to stand there, as though waiting for something.
Then she released my hand. “Fm going upstairs,” she announced.
“Good night, you all.” And she was gone with the quick, muted
patter of her rubber soles across the boards of the gallery floor and
down the hall inside.

I still stood there.

Till Adam said, “Why the hell don’t you sit down?”

So I sat down at the other end of the swing from Adam. He
tossed a pack of cigarettes my way. I took one, and fumbled in my
pockets for a match, but didn’t find one. He leaned toward me,
struck a match, and held it for my cigai*ette. As the flame flared
there in front of my face while the cigarette caught, I had the feel-
ing that he had put the light there for a purpose, to spy on my
face while bis own was back out of the direct rays. I had the crazy
impulse to Jerk back and wipe my hand across my mouth to see if
there was any lipstick there.

?97

But the cigarette caught, and I drew my head back from the
light and said, “Thanks.*’

“You’re welcome,” he replied, and that about wound up the
conversation for the evening. There was something for us to say.
He could ask me the question which I knew was in his mind. Or
I could answer it without his asking it. But neither of us said what
was to say. I was afraid he would ask me, for with all my saying
to myself that he could go to hell, that it wasn’t his business, I had
the feeling of guilt as though I had robbed him of something. But
at the same time I sat there keyed up and wanting him to ask me,
for I wanted to tell somebody that Anne Stanton was wonderful
and that I was in love. It was as though the condition of being in
love were not completed until I could say to somebody, “Look
here. I’m in love, be damned if I’m not.” At the moment it seemed
to require the telling for its fulfillment just as much as it would
later require the hot, moist contact of bodies. So I sat there in the
swing, in the dark, absorbed with the fact that I was in love, want-
ing to say it to complete it, and not, for the moment, missing Anne,
the object of my love, who had gone upstairs to her room. I was
so absorbed at the time with the fact of w^hat had happened to me
that I did not even wonder why she had gone upstairs. Later I de-
cided that she had gone because, having served notice to Adam
by standing there before him holding my hand, she wanted to
leave him alone with that fact, to let him accustom himself to the
new structure of our little crystal, our little world.

But maybe, I decided later, much later, years later when it didn’t
seem that it would ever matter again, she had gone up because she
had to be alone, to sit by the window in the unlighted room, look-
ing out on the night, or lying on the bed watching the dark ceiling,
to accustom herself to her new self, to see if she could breathe the
new air, or sustain herself in the new element or dive and lounge
in the new tide of feeling. Maybe she went up there to be alone,
absorbed in herself the way a child is absorbed in watching a
cocoon gradually part in the dusk to divulge the beautiful moth—
the Luna moth again, with its delicate green and silver damp and
crumpled but gradually spreading in the dusk, defining itself,
slowly fanning the air to make a breeze so light that you would
not be able to feel it on your eyeball were you to lean that close to
peer. So maybe she was up in the room trying to discover what
her new self was, for when you get in love you are made all over
again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great
mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out
of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what

298

it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of lov-
ing somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum
of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up.
So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however,
has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the
mass. So there are two you’s, the one you yourself create by loving
and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those
two you’s are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its
axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn’t
be any difference between the two you’s or any distance between
them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect
focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into
perfect adjustment.

Anyway, Anne Stanton, age seventeen, had probably gone up-
stairs to be alone because she was, all of a sudden, in love. She was
in love with a rather tall, somewhat gangly, slightly stooped youth
of twenty-one, with a bony horse face, a big almost askew hook of
a nose, dark unkempt hair, dark eyes (not burning and deep like
the eyes of Cass Mastern, but frequently vague or veiled, blood-
shot in the mornings, brightening only with excitement), big hands
that worked and twisted slowly on his lap, plucking at each other,
and twisted big feet that were inclined to shamble— a youth not
beautiful, not brilliant, not industrious, not good, not kind, not
even ambitious, given to excesses and confusions, thrown between
melancholy and random violence, between the cold mire and the
hot flame, between curiosity and apathy, between humility and self-
love, between yesterday and tomorrow. What she had succeeded
in creating out of that unpromising lump of clay scooped up from
the general earth, nobody was ever to know.

But in any case, in her loving she was also re-creating herself, and
she had gone upstairs to be in the dark and try to learn what that
new self was. While downstairs Adam and I sat in the swing on the
gallery, not saying a word. That was the evening Adam got counted
out for all the other evenings, and out you go, you dirty dishrag,
you.

Everybody else got counted out, too, for even on those evening
when a crowd would get together on the Stanton gallery, or my
mother’s, to play a phonograph and dance (with some of the boys—
some of them veterans back from France— slipping off to take a
drink from a bottle hidden out there in the crotch of a live oak),
Anne and I would count them out. For organdie and seersucker are
pretty thin materials, and the only person in the world I ever
danced decently with was Anne Stanton and the nights were waitn,

299

and I wasn't so much taller than Anne that I could not inhale the
full scent of her hair while our music-locked limbs paced out the
pattern of our hypnosis and our breathing kept time together, till,
after a while, I would pass from an acute awareness of body to a
sense of being damned near disembodied, of floating as light as a
feather or as light as a big empty-headed balloon held captive to
the ground by a single thread, and w^aiting for a puff of breeze.

Or we would get into the roadster and drive out of the Landing
and pull the cutout and tear along, hell-for-leatlier, or as much hell-
for-leather as was possible on die roads and with the mechanism,
of those days, out beyond the houses between the pines and the
tidelands, with her head leaned against my shoulder and her hair
puffed with the wind and tendrils whipping against my cheek. She
would lean there and laugh out loud and say, “Oh, Jackie, Jackie,
it’s a wonderful night, it’s a ivonderful night, it’s a wonderful night,
say it’s a wonderful night, Jackie-boy, say it, say it!” Till I had tO'
say it after her, like a lesson I was learning. Or she would hum
or sing a song, one of those off the phonograph— God, what were
they then? I don’t remember. And maybe let the humming die off,
and be perfectly still, with her eyes closed, until I stopped the car
at some place where the breeze off the Gulf was enough to blow the
mosquitoes away. (On nights when there wasn’t any breeze, you
simply didn’t do any stopping.) Sometimes then, when I stopped
the car she wouldn’t even open her eyes till I had leaned over ta
kiss her, and I might have to kiss her enough to stop her breath.
Or again, she would wait till just the instant before the kiss, then
open her eyes wide, all at once, and say, “Boo!” and laugh. Then
she’d be all knees and sharp elbows and little short laughs and
giggles and serpentine evasions and strategy worthy of a jujitsu
expert when I tried to capture her for a kiss. It was remarkable
then how that little seat of a roadster gave as much room for de-
ployment and maneuver as the classic plains of Flanders and how
a creature who could lie in your clutch as lissome as willow and
soft as silk and cuddly as a kitten could suddenly develop that
appalling number of cunning, needle-pointed elbows and astute
knees. While beyond the elbows and knees and sharp fingers, the
eyes gleamed in the moonlight, or starlight, through the hair that
had worked down loose, and the parted lips emitted the little bursts
of breathless laughter, between the chanted words— “I don’t— love—
Jackie-Boy— nobody loves Jackie-Bird— I don’t— love-Jackie-Boy—
nobody loves— Jackie-Bird— ” Till she would collapse laughing and
exhausted into my arms and take her kiss and sigh and whisper,
“I love Jackie-Boy,” and rub a finger lightly over my face, and re-

peat, “I love Jackie-Boy-even with his ugly nose!” Then she would
give the nose a sound tweak. And I would fondle that hooked,
askew, cartilaginous monstrosity, pretending great pain but proud
as Punch of the thing simply because she had put her fingers on it.

You never could tell whether it was going to be the long kiss
or the furious swirl of elbows and giggles. And it didn’t matter
much, for it always came to the same thing in the end, for she would
lean back with her head on my shoulder and look up at the sky.
Between kisses we might not talk at all, or I might quote her
poetry— for in those days I used to read some of it and thought I
liked it— or we would talk about what we would do after we were
married. I had never proposed to her. We simply assumed that we
were going to be married and be together always in a world com-
posed of sunlit beaches and moonlit pines by the sea and trips to
Europe (where neither of us had ever been) and a house in an oak
grove and the leather cushions of a roadster and somewhere a hand-
ful of delightful children who remained very vague in my imagina.
tion though very vivid in hers, and whose names, in moments when
other topics of conversation failed, we would decide on with great
debate and solemnity. All of them would have to have Stanton for
a middle name. And one of the boys would be named Joel Stanton
for the Governor. Of course, the oldest would be named Jack, for
me. ‘‘Because you are the oldest thing in the world, Jackie-Boy,”
Anne would say. “The oldest will be named Jackie for you, because
you are the oldest thing in the world, you are older than the ocean,
you are older than the sky, you are older than the ground, you are
older than the trees, and I always loved you and I always pulled
your nose because you are an old, old mess, Jackie-Boy, Jackie-Bird,
and I love you.” So she would pull my nose.

Only once, toward the end of the summer, did she ask me what
I was going to do for a living. Lying quietly on my arm, after a
long silence, she suddenly said, “Jack, what are you going to do?”

I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. So I said,
“What am I going to do? I am going to blow in your ear.” And
did it.

“What are you going to do? Do for a living?” she asked, again.

“Going to blow in your ear for a living,” I said.

She didn’t smile. “I mean it,” she said.

I didn’t answer for a minute. Then I said, “I’ve been thinking
I might study law.”

She was quiet for a little, then said, “You just thought of that
this minute. You just said it.”

I had just said it. The subject of my future, as a matter of fact,

SOI

was one on which I had never cared to dwell. I simply didn’t care.
I would think that I’d get a job, any kind oi a job, and do it and
collect my pay and spend the pay and go back to the job on Mon-
day morning, and that would be all. I had no ambitions. But I
couldn’t sit there and say to Anne, “Oh, I’ll just get some kind of
job.” I had to give the impression of being farsighted and pur-
poseful and competent.

I had played hell giving that impression.

She had seen right through me, like a piece of glass, and there
wasn’t anything to answer except to say that she was very wrong,
that I was indeed going to study law, and what was wrong with
studying law% please?

“You just made it up,” she repeated stubbornly.

“Hell,” I said, “I won’t let you starve, I’ll give you everything
you’ve got. If you’ve got to have a big house and a lot of Presses
and parties, well, I’ll—”

But I didn’t get to finish that.

“You know perfectly well. Jack Burden,” she interrupted, “I
don’t have to have anything like that. You're just being mean.
You’re trying to put me in wrong. I don’t want anything like
that. You know I don’t. You know I love you and I’ll live in a
shack and eat red beans if you’ve got to live that way because
what you want to do doesn’t make any money. But if you don't
want to do anything— even if you do just sort of get a job and have
plenty of money— oh, you know what I mean— you know the way
some people are,” She sat up very straight on the seat of the road
ster and her eyes, even in nothing but starlight, flashed that fine
seventeen-year-old scorn. Then she fixed the gleam on me very
steadily and said in a serious way that made her a funny mixture
of a really grown-up woman and a little girl play-acting, probably
with mother’s loose clip-clopping high-heeled shoes and a feather
boa, a serious way that made her both older and younger than she
was— she said, “You know I love you. Jack Burden, and I believe
in you. Jack Burden, and you are not going to be like those people.
Jack Burden.”

I laughed, it was so funny, and tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t
let me and became suddenly all sharp elbows and knees working
like a mowing machine and in dead earnest and I was the hay
crop. I couldn’t soothe her. I couldn’t even lay a finger on her. She
made me take her home, and wouldn’t even kiss me good night.

That was the last I heard of it, except for one sentence. The next
day, when she and I were lying out on the diving float she said,

302

all of a sudden, after a long sun-baked silence, “You remember last

night?”

I said I did.

“Well,” she said, “I meant it I really did.” Then she took her
hand out of mine, slipped off the float, and swam away to keep me
from making any answer.

I didn’t hear any more about the business. And didn’t think
anything more about it. Anne was just like before, and I fell back
into the full flood of the summer, into the full tide of feeling in
which we drifted in a kind of breathless ease, like a strong, massive,
deep current which didn’t hurry but which had an irresistible
weight of water behind it, and over which the days and nights
passed like flickers of light and shade. It was drifting, all right,
but not drifting in any nasty pejorative sense, like a waterlogged
old skiff drifting in a horsepond or a cake of soap in the gray water
before you pull the plug in the bathtub. No, it was a fine, conscious
surrender which was a participation in and a willing of the flood
itself, and not a surrender at all but an affirmation and all that,
like the surrender of the mystic to God, which isn’t a surrendering
to God any more than it is also a creating of God, for if he loves
God he has willed the being of God. Well, in my very surrender
I willed and mastered that great current in which I drifted, and
over which the days and nights flickered, and in which I didn’t have
to lift a hand to hurry myself, for the current knew its own pace
and own time, and would take me with it.

I never tried to hurry anything all summer. Not in the porch
swing, or in the pine woods, or on the float at night when we swam
out, or in the roadster. Everything that happened came to happen
as simply and as naturally and as gradually as a season coming on
or a plant unrolling a leaf or a kitten waking up. And there was a
kind of luxuriousness in not rushing things, in not driving toward
the hot grip and awkward tussle and the leer for the boys back in
the dormitory when you got in, a new sensuality in waiting for the
massive current to take you where you belonged and would go in
the end. She was young— she seemed younger to me then than she
did later on looking back, for that summer I was so sure that I
was old and jaded— and she was timid and sensitive and shy, but it
wasn’t any squealing, squeaking, pullet-squawking, teasing, twitch-
ing, oh-that’s-not-nice-and-I-never-let-anybody-do-that-before-oh kind
of shyness. Perhaps shyness is the wrong word for it, after all. Cer-
tainly it is wrong if back behind that word there is any implica-
tion or color of shame or fear or desire to be “nice.” For in one
way, she seemed to be detached from her very slender, compactly

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made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered body, as though
it were an elaborate and cunning mechanism in which she and I
shared ownership, w^hich had suddenly dropped to us out of tlie
blue, and tvhich, in our ignorance, we had to study with the great-
est patience and most reverent attention lest we miss some minute,
scliolarly detail without knowledge of which everything would be
wasted. So it was a period of the most delicate discrimination and
subtle investigations, wnth her seriousness mixed with a graceful
gaiety (“Oh, Jackie-Boy, oh, Jackie-Bird, it’s a wonderful night, a
wonderful night, his eyes are not bad but his nose is a fright”),
a gaiety to which the words didn’t mean much but the tune meant
everything, a tune which seemed to come from the very air as
though it were full of invisible strings and she simply reached out
at random in the dark to pluck them with an idle familiar finger.
And beyond the serious investigations was a kind of level-eyed
affection, as natural and simple as the air you breathe, which some-
times didn’t seem to belong with our hot-lipped and shallow-
breathed occupations, which seemed to be something I had always
had and not something connected with the new, mysterious body
which now fascinated both her and me. She would sit and cup my
head in both her hands and press it against her breast and sing,
with tlie words just a whisper, the rhymes she made up as she went
along (“Poor Jackie-Bird, he is a pest, but I’ll rock him to sleep in
a soft warm nest, and 111 sing a song to Jackie-Bird, the sweetest
song he ever heard, poor Jackie-Bird, poor Jackie-Bird”), and after
a while the words would just die away until there was only the
little crooning sound, with the whisper now and then, “Poor Jackie-
Bird, I’ll never let anything hurt poor Jackie-Bird.” Then after a
while I would turn my face a little, toward her body, and kiss it
through the light summer cloth and breathe through the cloth,
upon it.

We went quite a long way, that summer, and there were times
when I was perfectly sure I could have gone farther. When I could
have gone the limit. For that fine, slender, compactly made, tight-
muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered mechanism which fasci-
nated Anne Stanton and me, which had dropped to us out of the
blue, was a very sensitive and beautifully tuned-up contraption.
But maybe I was wrong in that surmise, and maybe I could not
have hurried the massive deliberation of that current in which we
were caught and suspended, or hurried Anne Stanton’s pensive and
scholarly assimilation of each minute variation which had to be
slowly absorbed into the body of our experience before another
could be permitted. It was as tliough she was aware of a rhythm,

a tune, a compulsion, outside o£ herself, and devoutly followed it
in its subtle and winding progression. But wrong or not, I did not
put my surmise to the test, for if I myself was not truly aware of
diat rhythm and compulsion which bemused her, I was aware of
her devotion to it, and could find every moment wdth her full
enough. Paradoxically enough, it was when I was away from her,
when I was withdrawn from her context, back in my room at night
or in the hot early afternoon, after lunch, that I was savagely im-
patient of tire delays and discriminations. This would be especially
true at those times when she wouldn’t see me for a day, the times
which seemed to mark, I came to understand, some stage, some
milepost, we had passed. She would simply withdraw herself from
me, as she had done that night after we first kissed, and leave me,
at first, confused and guilty, but later, as I came to grasp the pat-
tern of things, merely impatient for the next day when she would
appear at the court, swinging her racket, her face so smooth, young,
healthy and apparently disinterested, though comradely, that I
could not equate it with the face I remembered with the eyelids
drooping and the damp, starlight-or-moonlight-glistening lips
parted for the quick, shallow breath or the unashamed sigh.

But once, late in the summer, I didn’t see her for two days. The
night before, which was windless, with a full moon and an at-
mosphere that scarcely cooled or stirred with the coming on of
evening, Anne and I had swum down to the hotel diving tower,
late enough for everybody else to be out of the water. We lay on
the big float for a while, not doing any talking, not touching each
other, just lying on our backs and looking up at the sky. After a
while she got up and began to climb the tower. I rolled over on
my side to watch her. She went up to the twenty-foot board, poised
a moment, and did a swan dive, a nice one. Then she went up to
the next board. I don’t know how many dives she made, but it was
a lot. I drowsily watched them, watched her climb up, very slow,
rung by rung, the moonlight on the wet fabric of the dark bathing
suit making it look like metal, or lacquer, watched her poise at
the verge, lift her arms out to the tingling extreme, rise on her
toes, leave the board, and seem to hang there an instant, a dully
gleaming form so slender and high up it blotted out only a star
or two, just an instant before the heady swoop and the clean swish*
ing rip into the water as though she had dived through a great
circus hoop covered “with black silk spangled with silver.

It happened i/hen she took the highest dive I had ever seen her
take, perhaps the highest she was ever to take in her life. I saw her
climbing up, slow, then pass the board she had been using, the

305

twenty-foot board, and go on up. I called to her, but she didn’t
even look down at me. I knew she had heai'd me. I also knew that
she would go on where she was going, no matter what I said now,
now that she had started. I didn’t call again.

She made the dive. I knew it was a good one from the very in-
stant she left the boai'd, but I jumped to my feet, just the same,
and stood at the edge of the float, holding my breath, my eyes fixed
on her flight. Just as she entered the water, clean as a whistle, I
plunged in, too, diving deep and drawing down with my stroke.
I saw the silvery tangle and trail of bubbles and the glimmer of
her legs and arms in the dark water when she turned. She had gone
down deep. Not that she had to go down deep, for she could whisk
out shallow if she wanted. But that time— and other times— she
went in deep, as if to continue the flight as long as possible through
the denser medium. I pulled deep and met her as she began to rise.
I put my arms around her waist and drew her to me and put out
lips together. She let her arms trail down, loose, not making a mo-
tion, while I held her body to me and pressed her face back and
our legs trailed down together as we rose slowly and waveringly
through the blackness of the water and the silver of ascending
bubbles. We rose very slowly, or at least it seemed very slowly, and
I was holding my breath so long there was a pain in my chest and
a whirling dizziness in my head, but the pain and the dizziness had
passed the line over into a rapture like that I had had in my room
the night I had first taken her to a movie and had stopped on the
way home. I thought we would never reach the surface, we rose so
slowly.

Then we were there, with the moonlight brittle and fractured on
the water all about our eyes. We hung there together, still not
breathing, for another moment, then I released her and we fell
apart to float on our backs and gaspingly draw the air in and stare
up at the high, whirling, star-stung sky.

After a little while I realized that she was swimming away. I
thought that she would be taking a few strokes to the float. But
when I did finally roll over and swim to the float, she was already
at the beach. I saw her pick up her robe, wrap it around her, and
stoop to put on her sandals. I called to her. She waved back, then
shaking her hair loose out of the cap, began to run up the beach
toward home. I swam in, but by the time I reached the beach she
was near her house. I knew I couldn’t catch her. So I walked on up
the beach, taking my time.

I didn’t see her for two days after that. Then she appeared at the
tennis court, swinging her racket, friendly and cool, getting ready

306

to beat the hell out of me as soon as Adam had given me his lacing.

We were in September then. In a few days Anne was to leave to
go back up East to Miss Pound’s School. Her father was going to
take her a few days early and stop with her in Washington and
then in New York before sending her on to Boston, where Miss
Pound would get her hooks in. Anne hadn’t seemed particularly
excited about the trip, or about getting back to Miss Pound. She
liked the school fine, she had told me, but I hadn’t been over-
whelmed by tales of midnight snacks and memory books and that
darling teacher of French, and her vocabulary wasn’t slimed up
with offensive bits of esoteric finishing-school slang. Back in August
she had mentioned the plan, the date of departure, but without
pleasure or displeasure, as though it were something completely
irrelevant to us, the way a young person mentions death. When
she mentioned it, I had felt a sudden twinge, but I had managed to
put the thought aside, for even though the calendar said it was
August I had not been able to believe that the summer, and the
world, would ever end. But that morning when Anne reappeared
at the tennis court, my first thought was that she would be going
soon. It really came over me then. I went up to her, not even saying
hello, and took her hand, feeling a kind of unformulated despera-
tion and urgency.

She looked at me with an expression of mild surprise.

‘'Don’t you love me?” I demanded, angrily.

She burst out laughing, and fixed her eyes on me, with the
laughter making innocent, mocking crinkles at the outer corners
of the absolutely clear eyes. “Sure,” she said, laughing, the idle
racket swinging in her free hand, “sure, I love you, Jackie-Boy,
Jackie-Bird, who said I didn’t love poor old Jackie-Bird?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, for the language of all our nights in the
roadster and in the porch swing suddenly seemed, in the glare of
morning and with the desperation in me, fatuous and loathsome.
“Don’t be silly,” I repeated, “and don’t call me Jackie-Bird.”

“But you are Jackie-Bird,” she replied gravely, but with the
crinkles still at the corners of the eyes.

“Don’t you love me?” I demanded ignoring what she had said.

“I love Jackie-Bird,” she said, “poor Jackie-Bird.”

“God damn it,” I said, “don’t you love me?”

She studied me a moment, with the crinkles entirely gone now.
“Yes,” she said then, “I do,” and pulled her hand out of mine and
walked across the court, with a kind of finality in the stride as
though she had made up her mind to go somewhere and it was
quite a way and she had better start walking. She only walked

307

across the court, to sit on the bench in the feathery shade of the
mimosa, but I watched her as though tlie court were as wide as the
Sahara and she 'were dwindling into distance.

Then Adam came, and we played tennis.

She had come back that morning, but it was not to be as it had
been before. She had come back, ail right, but not all of her. She
was with me as much as before, but she seemed to be wrapped in
her own thoughts, and when 1 caressed her she seemed to submit
out of a sense of duty or at the best out of a kindness which wasn’t
quite contemptuous. That was the way it was for the last week,
while the days stayed hot and breathless, and clouds piled up in
the late afternoons as though promising a squall but the squall
didn’t come, and the nights '^\^ere as heavy and blunt as a big black
silver-dusted grape ready to burst.

Two nights before she was supposed to leave we went in to the
Landing to a movie. It was raining when we came out of the movie.
We had intended to go for a swim after the show, but we didn’t.
We had taken lots of swims in the rain, that summer and the sum-
mers before when Adam had been with us. We would no doubt
have gone that night too, if the rain had been a difiEerent kind of
rain, if it had been a light sweet rain, falling out of a high sky,
the kind that barely whispers with a silky sound on the surface
of the water you are swimming in, or if it had been a driven,
needle-pointed, cold, cathartic rain to make you want to run along
the beach and yell before you took refuge in the sea, or even if it
had been a torrent, the kind you get on the Gulf that is like noth-
ing so much as what happens when the bottom finally bursts out
of a big paper bag suspended full of water. But it wasn’t like any
of those kinds of rain. It was as though the sky had sagged down
as low as possible and there were a universal leaking of bilge down
through the black, gummy, dispirited air.

So we put the top up on the roadster, getting well wet doing it,
got in, and drove toward home. The light was blazing in my
mother’s place and on the gallery, and so we decided to go in there
and make some coffee and sandwiches. It was still early, about nine-
thirty. My mother, I remembered, had gone down the Row to play
bridge with the Pattons and some fellow who was visiting them
and was stuck on her. We wheeled up the drive and ground to a
stop with a great crunching and spraying of shells and rain water.
We ran up the right-hand sweep of the twin flights of steps leading
to the gallery, then safe under the gallery roof began to stamp and
shake the water from us like dogs. The running and stamping and
the wet had made Anne’s hair come loose. It was hanging down

308

her back, with some odd wet strands plastered aa'oss her brow and
one over her cheek to make her look like a child coming out of a
bath. She laughed as she cocked her head to one side and shook it,
tiie way ghis do, to make the hair fail free. She ran her spread
fingers through the hair like a big comb to catch the stray hairpins.
A couple of them fell to the gallery floor. ‘I’m a fright,” she said,
“Fm an awful fright,” and kept on cocking her head over and
laughing and looking up at me sidewise with bright eyes. She was
more like she had been before.

I said, yes, she was a fright, and we went on into the house.

I switched the light off in the big hall, but let the gallery lights
stay on, then led the way back to the kitchen, through the dining
room and pantry, off to the right of the hall. I put the coffee on
to make, and got some food out of the icebox (that was back yonder
before electric refrigerators or my mother would have had a brace
of them big as a log cabin and surrounded at midnight by ladies
with bare shoulders and tipsy men m dinner jackets, just like the
ads). While I did the scullery work, Anne was braiding her hair.
Apparently she was planning a pigtail on each side, for one was
well under way by die time I had the grub laid out on the kitchen
table. “Why don’t you make the sandwiclies and stop primping?”
I said.

“Ail right,” she said, “and youll have to fix the hair.”

So while she sat at the table and fixed the sandwiches, I finished
the first pigtail. “There ought to be a ribbon on it to hold it to-
gether,” I said, “or something.” I was pressing the end between my
fingers to keep it from coming unplaited. Then my eyes fell on a
clean dish towel on the rack. I dropped the braid and went over
to die towel and tore with the aid of a pocket knife two strips off
the end. The dish towel was white with a red border. I came back,
repaired the damage to the braid, and tied up the end with the
piece of towel in a bowknot. “Youll look like a pickaninny,” I
said. She giggled and kept on spreading peanut butter.

I saw that the coffee was made, and turned off the gas. Then I
began to work on the second pigtail. I leaned over and ran the
silky stuff through my fingers, which were all tingling thumbs as
rough as sandpaper, separated it into three skeins, and while J
folded them over into place, one after another, breathed in the
fresh meadowy smell the hair had because it was damp. I was thus
occupied when the telephone rang. “Take this,” I ordered Anne^
“or itll unravel,” and thrust the end of the pigtail at her. Then I
went out to the hall*

It was iny mother. She and the Pattons and the fellow who was

S09

stuck on her, and God knew who else, were going to pile into the
car and drive forty miles to La Grange, a joint in the next county,
on the road to the city, where there were a few dice tables and a
couple of roulette wheels and where the best people rubbed shouL
ders with the worst and inhaled a communal blue fog of throat-
lacerating tobacco smoke and illicit alcohol fumes. She said she
didn’t know when she’d be in, but to leave the door open, for she’d
forgotten her key. She didn’t have to tell me to leave die door open,
for nobody ever locked up in the Landing, anyway. She said not
to worry, for she felt lucky, and laughed and hung up. Well, she
needn’t have told me not to worry, either. Not about her luck. She
was lucky, all right. She got everything she wanted.

I hung up the receiver and looked up to see, in the light that
came to the hall from the door to the back passage, Anne standing
a few feet from me, just tying the bow to the end of the second
long pigtail. ’‘It was my mother,” I explained. “She and the Pattons
are going to La Grange.” Then added, “She won't be back till late.”

As I said that last, I was suddenly aware of the emptiness of the
house, the dark rooms around us, the weight of darkness stored
above us, stuffing the rooms and the attic, spilling thickly but
weightlessly down the stairs, and aware of the darkness outside. As
I looked into Anne’s face there wasn’t a sound in the house. Out-
side tliere was the drip on leaves and on the roof, now subsiding.
Then my heart took a big knock, and I felt the new blood coursing
through me as though somebody had opened a sluice gate.

I was looking right into Anne’s face, and doing so, I knew, and
knew that she knew, that this was the moment the great current of
the summer had been steadily moving toward all the time. I turned
around and moved slowly up the hall toward the foot of the stairs.
I couldn’t tell at first whether she was following or not. Then I
knew she was. I climbed the stairs, and knew she was following
about four steps behind me.

At the head of the stairs, in the upstairs hall, I didn’t even pause
or look around. I moved up the hall, which was pitch dark, toward
the door of my room. My hand touched the knob in the dark, and
I pushed the door open and entered. There was a little light in the
room, for the night had, apparently, cleared for the moment, and
too, the glare of the gallery light below was reflected up from the
wet leaves. I stood to one side, with my hand still on the knob of
the door, while she walked into the room. She didn’t even glance
at me as she came in. She took about three steps into the room
and stopped. I closed the door and moved toward the white-clothed
narrow figure; but she did not turn around. I stood behind her

310

drawing her shoulders back against me and folding my forearms
over her bosom and putting my dry lips down against her hair.
Meanwhile her arms hung loosely at her sides. We stood that way
for a couple of minutes, like lovers in an advertisement watching
a dramatic sunset or the ocean or Niagara Falls. But we weren’t
watching anything. We were standing in the middle of a bare,
shadowy room (iron bed, old dresser, pine table, trunks and books
and male gear—for I hadn’t let my mother turn that room into a
museum) and staring across the room out into the dark tops of
trees which all at once began to stir with a wind oflE the Gulf and
rattle in an increase of rain.

Then Anne lifted her arms and folded them before her so that
one of her hands was on each of mine. “Jackie,” she said in a low
voice, which wasn’t, however, a whisper, “Jackie>Bird, I came up
here.’'

She had come, all right.

I began to undo the hooks and eyes down the back of the white
dress. She stood absolutely still, as though good and obedient, with
a pigtail hanging back over each shoulder. The fact that the light
cloth was damp and clingy didn’t make things any easier. I kept
fumbling the God-damned hooks and eyes. Then I came to the
sash. It was tied in a bow on the left side, I remember. I got that
free, and it fell to the floor, and I began again on the dress. She
was as patient, standing there with her arms at her side, as though
I were a dressmaker and she were having a fitting. She didn’t say
anything except when I, in my clumsiness and confusion, tried to
pull the dress down over her hips. “No,” she said then, in the same
low voice as before, “no, this way,” and lifted her bare arms above
her head. I noticed, even then, that she didn’t let the fingers fall
loose in the natural way, but held them together on each hand,
and almost straight, as though she were lifting her arms for a dive
and had stopped just before completing the preliminary posture.
I drew the dress over her head and stood there with it clutched
foolishly in my hands before I got the wit to lay it across a chair.

She was standing with her arms still up, and I took that as a sign
the slip was to come off the same way the dress had. It came off the
same way, and with my clumsy, nervous meticulousness I laid it
across a chair, as though it might break. She lowered her arms to
her sides and stood with the same passivity while I finished the
task. While I unhooked the brassiere, and lifted it forward so that
it would fall down her motionless arms, and released the drawers
and drew them down her legs, kneeling on the floor beside her,
I was somehow so careful that my fingers never even brushed her

311

skin. My breath was quick and the constriction in my throat and
chest was like a knot, but my mind kept flying off to peculiar things
—to a book I had started and never finished, to wondering whether
I would go back to the dormitory that fall or take a room out, to
an algebraic formula I remembered which kept running through
my head, to a scene, just the corner of a field with a broken stile,
which I tried desperately to locate out of my past. My mind would
just take those crazy wild leaps and centrifugal plunges like an
animal with one foot in a trap or a June bug on a string.

As I crouched there beside her, just as I had let the batiste di'op
about her feet, she slipped one foot from its pump— you know how
girls do, pressing the heels together a little so that the feet can be
drawn out— then the othei. I rose to stand beside her, and ex-
perienced a kind of shock to find how small she was, standing flat
on the floor without her heels. I had seen her that way a thousand
times, in a bathing suit, standing barefooted on the sand or float.
But it struck me now.

She stood there, as I rose, with her arms hanging loose as before,
then she folded them across her breast and hunched her shoulders
a little and gave a slight shiver, and I saw how with the drawing
forward of the shoulders the shoulder blades suddenly seemed sharp
and frail, with a pigtail hanging down across each one.

It was raining hard outside now, with violent gusts. I noticed
that.

Her head was slightly inclined forward, and she apparently saw,
or remembered, that she still had on her stockings. Turning from
me a little, she leaned forward, and balancing herself on one foot
and then the other, drew them off and let them fall with the sash
and the little wispy pile of stuff there before her. Then she stood
as before, hunched slightly forward, perhaps shivering, her knees
slightly bent and pressed together.

While I stood there fumbling with the buttons on my shirt, tear-
ing one loose because I couldn't seem to get it through the but-
tonhole (in a momentary lull of the wind and rain, it made a single
tick when it struck the uncarpeted floor), and while my mind made
the crazy June^bug leaps and plunges, she walked across to the iron
bed and sat down, tentatively, close to the edge, her feet and knees
pressed close, her arms still folded and her shoulders slightly
hunched as before. She was looking up at me across the space, with
a question, or appeal, in her eyes— I couldn't read them in the dim-
ness.

Then, letting one hand drop to the bed for support, she leaned
a little sideways, lifted her feet from the floor, still together, and

312

with a gentle, curling motion, lay back on the white counterpane
then punctiliously straightened out and again folded her hands
aCTOSS her bosom, and closed her eyes.

And at the instant when she closed her eyes, as I stared at her,
my mind took one of the crazy leaps and I saw her floating in the
water, that day of the picnic three years before, with her eyes
closed and the violent sky above and the white gull flashing high
over, and that face and this face and that scene and this scene
seemed to fuse, like superimposed photographs, each keeping its
identity but without denying the other. And at that instant, as
I stood there with the constriction in my throat that made me swal-
low hard and with my body tumescent, I looked at her there on the
iron bed, then looked suddenly around the big, bare, shadowy
room and heard the gusty rain and knew that everything was wrong,
completely wrong, how I didn’t know, didn’t try to knuw, and that
this was somehow not what the summer had been driving toward.
That I wasn’t going to do it. “Anne,” I said, hoarsely, “Anne—”

She didn’t answer, but she opened her eyes, and looked at me.

“We oughtn’t,” I began, “we oughtn’t— it wouldn’t— it wouldn’t
be— it wouldn’t be right.” So I used the word right, which came to
my lips to surprise me, for I hadn’t ever thought of anything I had
done with Anne Stanton or with any other woman or girl as being
right or wrong, but as just something that happened, and hadn’t
ever thought about right or wrong very much in connection with
anything but had simply done the things people do and not done
the things people don’t do. Which are the things people do and
don’t do. And I remember now the surprise I felt when I heard that
word there in the air, like the echo of a word spoken by somebody
else God knows how many years before, and now unfrozen like a
word in Baron Munchausen’s tale. I couldn’t any more have
touched her then than if she had been my little sister.

She didn’t answer then, but kept on looking at me, with an ex-
pression I could not fathom, and as I looked at her I was over-
whelmed by a great, warm pity, like a flood in my bosom, and
burst out, “Anne-oh, Anne-” and the impulse to fling myself
to my knees beside the bed and seize .er hand.

Now if I had done that, things mi-l«t have developed differently
and more in the normal pattern, for it is probable that when a.
half-clothed and healthy young man kneels beside a bed and seizes
the hand of an entirely unclothed and good-looking young girl,
developments will follow the normal pattern sooner or later. And
if I had once touched her in the process of undressing her. or even
if she had spoken to me to say anything, to call me Jackie-Boy or

tell me she loved me, or had giggled or seemed gay, or had even
answered me, saying anything whatsoever, when I looked at her
lying there on tiie bed and first cried out her name— if any of those
things had happened things might have been different then and
forever afterward. But none of those things had happened, and I
was not to follow the wild impulse to throw myself on my knees
by the bed and take her hand to make the first mfiing contact of
flesh with flesh, which would probably have been enough. For just
as I burst out, *‘Anne— oh, Anne—’' there was the sound of tires on
the drive, then the creaking of brakes.

*‘They’ve come back, they’ve come back!” I exclaimed, and Anne
rose abruptly to a sitting position on the bed and looked wildly at
me.

“Grab your «ituff,” I ordered, “grab your stuff, and get to the
bathroom— you could have been in the bathroom!” I was cramming
my shirt in and was trying to buckle my belt all at once and was
going toward the door. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” I said, “I’ll be
fixing something to eat!”

Then I bolted from the room, and ran down the hall, trying to
run on tiptoe, and ran down the back stairs to the back passage
and then into the kitchen, where I put a match to the gas under
the coffeepot with trembling fingers just as the front screen door
slammed and people entered the hall. I sat down at the table and
began to make sandwiches, waiting for my heart to stop pounding
before I confronted my mother and the Pattons and whatever bas-
tards they had with them.

When my mother came on back to the kitchen, right away, fol-
lowed by her gang, there I was and there was a nice pile of tooth-
some sandwiches and they weren’t going to La Grange because of
the storm and kidded me about being a mind reader and having
the sandwiches and coffee all ready for them, and I was charming
and gracious to them all. Then Anne came down (she had done a
good circumstantial job and flushed the toilet twice to advertise her
w^hereabouts) and they kidded her about her pigtails and her picka-
ninny hair ribbons, and she didn’t say anything but smiled shyly
the way a nice well-bred young girl should when the grownups take
amiable notice of her, and thm she sat quietly and ate a sandwich
and I couldn’t read a thing from her face, not a thing.

Well, that was the way the summer ended. True, there was the
rest of the night, with me lying on the iron bed and hearing the
leaves drip and cursing myself for a fool and cursing my luck and
trying to figure out what Anne had thought and trying to plan how
I would get her off alone the next day— the last day. But then I

314

would think how if I had gone on, it would have been worse, with
my mother coming back and going upstairs with the ladies (as she
had done), and with Anne and me trapped there in my room. And
as that thought scared me into a cold sweat, I suddenly had the
feeling of great wisdom: I had acted rightly and wisely. Therefore
we had been saved. And so my luck became my wisdom (as the
luck of the damned human race becomes its wisdom and gets into
the books and is taught in schools), and then later my wisdom be-
came my nobility, for in the end, a long time after, I got the notion
that I had acted out of nobility. Not that I used that word to my-
self, but I skirted all around its edges and frequently, late at night
or after a few drinks, thought better of myself for remembering my
behavior on that occasion.

And as my home movie unrolled, as I drove west, I could not
help but reflect that if I hadn’t been so noble—if it was nobility—
everything would have been different. For certainly if Anne and
I had been trapped in that room, my mother and Governor Stan-
ton would have set us up in matrimony, even if grimly and grudg-
ingly. And then whatever else might have happened, the thing that
had happened to send me west would never have happened. So,
I observed, my nobility (or whatever it was) had had in my world
almost as dire a consequence as Cass Mastern’s sin had had in his.
Which may tell something about the two worlds.

There was, as I was saying, the rest of the night after Anne had
gone home. But there was also the next day. Anne, however, was
busy packing and doing errands in the Landing during the day.
I hung around her house, and tried to talk with her, but we never
got more than a few words together, except when I drove her down
to town. I tried to make her marry me right away, just to go home
and get a bag and tear out. She was under age, and all that, but
I figured we could get by— in so far as I figured anything. Then
let the Governor and my mother raise hell. She only said, ‘'J^^kie-
Boy, you know I’m going to marry you. Of course, I’m going to
marry you forever and ever. But not today.” When I kept pestering
her, she said, ‘‘You go on back to State and finish up and 111 marry
you. Even before you get your law degree.”

When she said “law degree,” I didn’t really remember right off
what she was talking about. But I remembered in time not to ex-
press any surprise and had to be satisfied with that.

I helped her with the errands, took her home, and then went to
my house for dinner. After dinner I went to see her early, going in
the roadster with the hope, despite the lowering, gusty weather, that
we could take a ride. But it was no soap. Some of the boys and girls

315

we had played round with that summer were there to tell Anne
good-bye, and some parents, two couples, were there, too, to see the
Governor (who wasn’t Go\ernor any more, but to the Landing
would always be the “Governor”) and give him a stirrup cup. The
young people played a phonograph on the gallery, and the old
people, who looked old to us anyway, sat inside and drank gin and
tonic. The best I could do was to dance with Anne, who was sweet
to me but who, when I kept asking her to slip out with me, said
she couldn’t just then, she couldn’t because of the guests and she’d
try to later. But then another storm blew up, for it was right at die
equinox, and the parents came out to say they had better go home,
and told their particular young ones in a loud voice that they ought
to come too and let Anne get some sleep for the trip.

I hung around, but it didn’t do any good. Governor Stanton sat
in the living room and had another drink by himself and looked
over the evening paper. We clung together in the porch swing, and
listened to his paper rattle when he turned the page, and whispered
that we loved each other. Then we just clung without talking, for
the words began to lose their meaning, and listened to the rain beat
the trees.

When a little break came in the rain, I got up, went inside, and
shook hands with the Governor, then came out, kissed Anne good-
bye, and left. It was a stiflE cold-lipped kiss, as though the summer
never had been at all, or hadn’t been what it had been.

I went on back to State. I felt that I couldn’t wait for Christmas
when she would come home. We wrote every day, but the letters be-
gan to seem like checks drawn on the summer’s capital. There had
been a lot in the bank, but it is never good business practice to live
on your capital, and I had the feeling, somehow, of living on the
capital and watching something dwindle. At the same time, I was
wild to see her.

I saw her Christmas, for ten days. It wasn’t like the summer. She
told me she loved me and was going to marry me, and she let me
go pretty far. But she wouldn’t marry me then, and she wouldn’t
go the limit. We had a row about that just before she left. She had
been willing to in September, but now she wouldn’t. It seemed that
she was, in a way, breaking a promise, and so I got pretty mad. I
told her she didn’t love me. She said she did. I wanted to know why
she wouldn’t go on, then. “It’s not because I’m afraid and it’s not
because I don’t love you. Oh, I do love you, Jackie, I do,” she said,
“and it’s not because I’m a nasty old nicey-pants. It’s because you
are the way you are, Jackie.”

316

'‘Yeah/' I sneered, “you mean you don't trust me, you think 1
wouldn’t marry you and then you'd be the ruined maid."

“I know you’d man-y me,” she said, “it’s just because you’re the
way you are."

But she wouldn’t say any more. So we had an awful row. I went
back to State a nervous wreck.

She didn’t wTite to me for a month. I held out about two weeks,
and then began to apologize. So the letters began again, and far off
somewhere in the great bookkeeping system of the universe some-
body punched some red buttons ever}^ day on a posting machine
and some red figures w^ent on the ledger sheet.

She was back at the Landing in June for a few days. But the
Governor was not well and before long the doctors packed him off
to Maine to get him out of the heat. He took Anne with him. Before
she left, it was just like Christmas, and not like the summer before.
It was even worse than Christmas, for I had my B.A. now and it
was time for me to get into the Law School. We had a row about
that. Or was it about that? She said something about law and I blew
up. We made it up, by letter, after she had been in Maine six weeks,
and the letters began again and the red figures fell like bloody little
bird tracks on that ledger leaf bearing my name in the sky, and I
lay around Judge Irwin’s house and read American history, not for
school, not because I had to, but because I had, by accident, stepped
through the thin, crackly crust of the present, and felt the first pull
of the quicksand about my ankles. When she came back for a week
or so in the fall, with her father, before she went off to some refined
female college in Virginia, we spent a lot of time in the bay and in
the roadster, and made all the motions we had made before. She
flew down from the diving tower like a bird. She lay in my arms in
the moonlight, when there was moonlight. But it was not the -way
it had been.

For one thing, there was the incident of the new kiss. About the
second or third time we were together that fall, she kissed me in a
new way, a way she had never used before. And she didn't do it in
the discriminating, experimental way she had done things tlie sum-
mer before. She just did it, in the heat of the moment, you might
say. I knew right away she had picked it up from some man up in
Maine that summer, some summer bastard in white flannel pants
with vowels diat clicked like dominoes. I told her I knew she'd been
fooling with some fellows in Maine. She didn't deny it, not even for
an instant. She just said, “Yes," as cool as could be, and asked me
how I knew. I told her. Then she said, “Oh, of course," and I got

317

pretty mad and pulled away from her. She had kept her arm around
my neck the whole time.

She just looked at me, still cool, and said, ^ a man

up in Maine. He was a nice boy. Jack, and I liked him a lot and he
was fun to be with. But I didn’t love him. And if you and I hadn’t
had that row and I hadn’t felt that the world had sort of come to
an end and I wouldn’t be with you again, I wouldn’t have done it.
Maybe I wanted to fall in love with him. To fill up the empty place
you left, Jackie.—Oh, Jackie, there was a place, an awful big place-”
And with a simple unthinking gesture she laid her right hand on
her heart. ''But I couldn’t,” she said. "I couldn’t fail in love with
him. And I quit kissing him. Even before we made up, you and I.”
She reached out and laid her right hand on one of my hands, and
leaned toward me. "For we did make up, you and I,” she asked,
"didn’t we, Jackie-Bird?” She laughed a quick laugh that welled up
in her throat, then asked, "Didn’t we, Jackie-Boy? Didn’t we? And
I’m happy again!”

"Yeah,” I said, "we did.”

"Aren’t you happy?” she asked, leaning.

"Sure,” I said, and was as happy, I suppose, as I deserved to be.
But the thing was there ail the time, breathing back there in the
dark of my mind and waiting to pounce. Even though I forgot it
was there. Then, the next night when she didn’t kiss me in the new
way, I felt the thing stir. And the next night. Because she didn’t kiss
that new way I was even angrier than I had been when she had. So
I kissed her the way that man in Maine had done. She drew back
from me immediately and said, quite quietly, "I know why you did
that.”

“You liked it well enough up in Maine,” I said.

"Oh, Jackie,” she said, "there isn’t any place called Maine and
never was, there just isn’t anything but you and you are all forty-
eight states together and I loved you all the time. Now will you be
good? And kiss me our way?”

So I did that, but the world is a great snowball rolling downhill
and it never rolls uphill to unwind itself back to nothing at all and
nonhappening.

Even though the summer just past had not been like the summer
before, I went on to State again and got my job back hashing and
did some newspaper reporting and entered the Law School and
loathed it. Meanwhile I wrote letters to Anne at the very refined
female college in Virginia, and the capital on which those checks
were drawn dwindled and dwindled. Till Christmas, when I came
home and Anne came home. I told her I simply loathed the Law

School, and expected (and, in a twisted way, wanted) hell to pop.
But hell did not pop. She merely reached over and patted my hand.
(\Ve w^ere sitting on die couch in the Stanton living room, where w^e
had clutched and clung until we had finally fallen apart from each
other, she in a kind of withdrawn melancholy, and I in the fatigue
and irritation of desire too long protracted and frustrated.) She
patted my hand, and said, ‘‘Well, don’t study law, then. You don’t
have to study law.”

“What do you want me to do then?”

“Jackie, I never wanted you to study law. It was your idea.”

“Oh, was it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and patted my hand again. “Do what you want
to, Jackie. I want you to do what you want. And I don’t care if you
don’t make money. I told you long back I’d live on red beans with
you.”

I got up from the couch. For one reason so she couldn’t pat my
hand in that way which suddenly reminded me of the way a nurse
pats the hand of a patient, a sort of impersonal pat intended to be
soothing. I stood well back from her, and spoke firmly. “All right,
you’ll eat red beans with me. Let’s get married. Tomorrow. To-
night. We’ve fooled around long enough. You say you love me. All
right, I love you.”

She didn’t say anything, but sat there on the couch with her
hands lying loose in her lap, and lifted her face, which suddenly was
tired and drawn, and looked up at me from eyes which gradually
brightened with unshed tears.

“You do love me?” I demanded.

She nodded slowly.

“And you know I love you?” I demanded.

She nodded again.

“All right, then?”

“Jack,” she said, then stopped for a moment. “Jack, I do love you.
I guess I feel sometimes that I might just kiss you and hold you
tight and close my eyes and jump off a cliff with you. Or like that
time when you dived down to me and we kissed in the water and it
seemed like we’d never come up. Do you remember. Jack?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I loved you like that then. Jack.”

“Now?” I demanded, “what about now?”

“Now, too, Jack, I guess I could do it now, too. But it’s different,
too.”

“Different?”

“Oh, Jack,” she exclaimed, and for the first time, at least the first

S19

time I ever remembered, made the gesture of lifting her hands to
her temples, that gesture to control distraction which was never to
become characteristic but which I was to see again. “Oh, Jack,” she
said again, “things have happened, so much has happened. Since
then.”

“What has happened?”

“Oh, it’s just that getting married isn’t like jumping off a cliff.
Love isn’t either, isn’t like jumping off a cliff. Or getting drowned.
It’s— it’s-oh, I don’t know how to say it— it’s trying to live, it’s hav-
ing a way to live.”

“Money,” I said, “if it’s money you—”

“It’s not money,” she interrupted, “I don’t mean money— oh.
Jack, if you only could see what I mean!”

“Well, I’m not going to get a job with Patton or anybody round
here. Or have them get me a job. Not even Irwin. I’ll get a job, I
don’t care what kind, but not with them.”

“Darling,” she said tirediy, “I’m not trying to make you come
here. Or get a job with Patton. Or anybody. I want you to do what
you want. Just so it is something. Even if you don’t make money. I
told you I’d live in a shack.”

So I went back to the Law School and by dint of consistent effort
succeeded in busting out before the end of the year. It took a lot of
attention to get busted out, for a man just can’t achieve that by the
ordinary means at State. He has to work at it. I could have simply
resigned, of course, but if you simply drop out or resign, you might
be able to come back. So I busted out. Then while I was celebrating
my busting out and was pretty sure Anne would be sore and throw
me over, I got involved with a pal of mine and two girls and there
was a small scandal, which got into the papers. I was an ex-student
then, and so the University couldn’t do anything about it. Anne
didn’t do anything either, for I guess I was an ex-Jackie-Bird by that
time.

So Anne went her way and I went mine. My way was to work for
a newspaper and hang around the lower part of the city and read
books on American history. Finally I was taking courses at the Uni-
versity again, just spare time at first, then seriously. I was entering
the enchantments of the past. For a while it looked as though Anne
and I had made it up, but somehow a gear slipped and it was like
before. I didn’t finish the Ph.D. So I went back to the Chronicle^
where I was a reporter and a damned good one. I even got married.
To Lois, who was damned good looking, a lot better looking, I sup-
pose, than Anne, and juicy while Anne was inclined to bone and
muscle under flesh, Lois looked edible, and you knew it was tender

320

all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon
and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue and ready to bleed gold.
Lois married me for reasons best known to herself. But one was, I
am sure, that my name was Burden. I am forced to this conclusion
by the process of elimination. It could not have been my beauty,
grace, charm, wit, intellect, and learning, for, in the first place, my
beauty, grace, and charm, were not great, and in the second place,
Lois didn’t have the slightest interest in wit, intellect, and learning.
Even if I had had them. It could not have been my mother’s money,
for Lois’s own widowed mother had plenty of money, which Lois’s
father had made from a lucky war contract for gravel, a little too
late to give those things called advantages to his daughter at her
most impressionable age. So it must have been the name of Burden.

Unless it was that Lois was in love with me. I put this possibility
in the list merely for logical and schematic completeness, for I am
quite sure that the only things Lois knew about love w^as how to
spell the word and how to make the physiological adjustments tradi-
tionally associated with the idea. She did not spell very well, but
she made those adjustments with great skill and relish. The relish
was nature, but the skill was art, and ars longa est. I knew this
despite the very expert and sustained histrionics of which Lois was
capable. I knew it, but I succeeded in burying it out in the back
yard of my mind, like a rat that has been caught in the pantry
gnawing the cheese. I didn’t really care, I suppose, so long as noth-
ing happened to make me have to face the fact. And once in my
arms, Mrs. Burden was very faithful or very discreet, for nothing
ever happened. And the arrangement was perfect.

“Jack and I are perfectly adjusted sexually,” Lois used to say
primly, for she was very advanced in what with her passed for
thought and was very sophisticated in her language. She would look
around at the faces of the guests in the very slick modernistic apart-
ment (her taste ran that way and not to balconies overlooking
charming old patios, and her money paid the rent), and would tell
them how perfectly adjusted she and I were, and in telling them
would add about two extra chocolate-cream-puff syllables to the
word sexually. For a while I didn’t mind her telling the guests
about how well adjusted we were. It even flattered my ego, for no-
body would mind having his name coupled with that of Lois or
having his picture taken with her in a public place. So I would
beam modestly around the little group, while Lois told them about
that perfect adjustment. But later it began to annoy me.

As long as I regarded Lois as a beautiful, juicy, soft, vibrant,
sweet-smelling, sweet-breathed machine for provoking and satisfy^

S21

ing the appetite (and that was tlie Lois I had married), ail was well.
But as soon as I began to regard her as a person, trouble began. Ail
would have been w^ell, perhaps, had Lois been struck dumb at
puberty. Then no man could have withstood her. But she could
talk, and w^hen something talks }ou sooner or later begin to listen
to the sound it makes and begin, even in the face of all other evi-
dence, to regard it as a person. You begin to apply human standards
to it, and the human element infects }our innocent Eden pleasure
in the juicy, s'vveet-breadied machine. I had loved Lois the machine,
the w^ay }ou love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach, but I defi-
nitely was not in love with Lois the person. In fact, as the realiza-
tion grew that the machine-Lois belonged to, and was the instru-
ment of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk),
the machine-Lois w’hich I had innocently loved began to resemble
a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering
deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorse-
lessly. Or it resembled the butt of wine in which the duke was
drotvned, and I was sure-God the Duke of Clarence. Or it resembled
a greedy, avid, delicious quagmire which would swallow up the lost,
benighted traveler with a last tired, liquid, contented sigh. Yes, in
that greedy, delicious quagmire, the solemn temples, the gorgeous
palaces, towers, battlements, libraries, museums, huts, hospitals,
houses, cities, and all the works of man might be swallowed up,
with that last luxurious sigh. Or so, I recall, it seemed. But the
paradox is that as long as Lois was merely the machine-Lois, as long
as she was simply a well-dressed animal, as long as she was really a
part of innocent nonhuman nature, as long as I hadn’t begun to
notice that the sounds she made were words, there was no harm in
her and no harm in the really extraordinary pleasure she could pro-
vide. It was only when I observed that this Lois was mixed up with
the other Lois, with certain human traits, that I began to feel that
aU the works of man might be swallowed up in the quagmire. It is
a delicate paradox.

I did not make a decision not to be swallowed up. The instinct
for self-preservation is more deep-seated than decision. A man
doesn’t make a decision to swim when he falls into the creek. He
starts kicking. I simply began to wriggle and squirm and kick. First,
I recall, there was the matter of Lois’s friends (no friends of mine
ever set foot in the slick apartment, if as a matter of fact, the people
I knew in the city room and the speak-easy and the press club could
be called friends). I began to take a distaste to the friends Lois had.
There was nothing particularly wrong with them. They were just
the ordinary garden variety of human garbage. There were some

322

who had what Lois, who was not too well informed on the subject,
regarded as ‘‘position” but who didn’t have much money and liked
Lois’s free likker. There were some who didn’t have any “position”
but who had more mone\ than Lois and knew which fork to use.
And there were some who didn’t have very much of either position
or money, but who had some credit at the better clothing stores and
who could be bullied by Lois. They all read Vanity Fair or Harper's
Bazaar (according to sex, and some read both) and Smart Set, and
they quoted Dorothy Parker, and those who had been merely to
Chicago licked the spittle of those who had been to New York, and
those who had been merely to New York licked the spittle of those
who had been to Paris. As I say, there was nothing particularly
wrong with those people, many of whom were quite agreeable and
attractive. The only thing I found wrong with them, I admit as I
look back, was that they were Lois’s friends. First, I developed a
certain reserve in my dealings with them, then I developed an atti-
tude which Lois defined as snotty. After one of my exhibitions Lois
would try to discipline me by withholding the sweets of her gender.

That was die matter of Lois’s friends. But there was, second, the
matter of Lois’s apartment. I took a distaste for the apartment. I
told Lois I didn’t want to live there. That we would get a place on
which I could afford to pay the rent out of my salary. We had some
rows on that point, rows which I didn’t expect to win. Then the
sweets would be withheld.

That was the matter of the apartment. But there was, third, the
matter of my clothes and what Lois loved to call my “grooming.”
I was accustomed to thirty-dollar suits, shirts that had been worn
two days, a bimonthly haircut, unpolished shoes, a hat with a brim
that looped and sagged, and fingernails always broken and some-
times dirty. And I regarded the habit of pressing pants as something
which had not come to stay. In the early days when I looked on Lois
as merely the luscious machine, I had allowed certain scarcely per-
ceptible changes to be made in my appearance. But as I began to
realize that the noises she made with her mouth resembled human
speech and were more than rudimentary demands for, or expres-
sions of gratification at, food or copulation, a certain resistance be-
gan to grow in me. And as the pressure to improve my grooming
increased, so the resistance increased, too. More and more often,
accustomed objects of my wardrobe disappeared, to be replaced by
proclaimed or surreptitious gifts. Originally I had interpreted these
gifts as springing from a misguided and love-inspired attempt to
give me pleasure. In the end I understood that my pleasure was the
last consideration involved. The crisis came when I polished a shoe

S23

with a new tie. A row ensued, the first of many occasioned by the
divergence of our tastes in haberdashery. And the sweets would be
withheld on that count.

They were withheld on many counts. But never for very long at
a stretch. Sometimes I w^ould capitulate and apologize. My earl)
apologies were sometimes sad and, for the moment, even sincere,
though sometimes sincere with a kind of self-pity. Then later, they
became masterpieces of irony, double-entendre ^ and histrionics, and
I tvouid lie in bed, uttering them, aware that my face in the dark
was twisted into a mask of self-congratulatory cunning, bitterness,
and loathing. But I ivasnh always the one to crack first, for some-
times the juicy machine-Lois got the upper hand over the dry and
brittle person-Lois. She might utter an invitation in a low voice
♦ense with hatred, and then in the subsequent process avert her face
from me, or if she did look at me, she would glare like a cornered
animal. Or if she did not invite me, she might collapse in the heat
of a scuffle which she had undertaken against me in all seriousness
but which had proved too much for the dry and brittle person-Lois
and had given the other Lois the upper hand. In any case, whether
she cracked or I, we demonstrated, in the midst of tangled bed-
clothes, unspoken loathing, and the wreckage of somebody's self-
respect, that w^e were, as Lois had affirmed to her guests, perfectly
adjusted sexually. And we were.

The fact that the adjustment w^as so perfect merely meant that
in the end, with the deep-seated instinct for self-preservation, I was
consorting with common whores. I was at that time on the evening
edition, and finished my stint about two in the afternoon. After a
couple of drinks and a late lunch in a speak-easy, then a couple
more drinks and a game of billiards at the press club, I might call
on one of my friends. Then at dinner, if I managed to get home to
dinner, and in the evening I would study Lois with a clinical de-
tadiment and a sense of mystic regeneration. It even got so that
almost at will I could produce an optical illusion. I could look at
Lois in a certain way and find that she seemed to be withdrawing
steadily, the whole room elongating with her, until it would be as
though I were staring at her through the wrong end of a pair of
binoculars. By this practice I gained great spiritual refreshment. I
finally grew so adept at it that I could hear her voice, if it was one
of her vituperative and not sullen evenings, as though it were com-
ing from a great distance and “were not, as a matter of fact, even
addressed to me.

Then came the final phase, the phase of the Great Sleep. Immedi-
ately after dinner every evening, I went to bed and slept soundly,

324

with the sweet feeling of ever falling toward the center of delicious
blackness, until the last possible moment the next morning. Some-
times I did not even wait for dinner and the pleasure of observing
Lois. I would just go to bed. I remember that this became almost
a habit in the late spring. I would come in from my afternoon’s
occupation and draw the shade in the bedroom and go to bed, with
the mild light oozing in from around the shade and birds twittering
and caroling in the trees of the little park next the apartment build-
ing and children calling musically from the playground in the park.
Going to bed in the late spring afternoon or just ai the beginning
of twilight, with those sounds in your ears, gives you a wonderful
sense of peace, a peace which must resemble the peace of old age
after a well-spent life.

But of course there was Lois. Sometimes she would come into
my bedroom— by this time 1 had moved into the guest room for my
serious sleeping— and sit on the edge of the bed and give me long
descriptions of myself, rather monotonous descriptions, as a matter
of fact, for Lois had little gift of phrase and had to fall back on the
three or four classic terms. Sometimes she would beat me with her
clenched fists. She had a feeble, female way of using her little white
fists. I could sleep through the descriptions, and almost through the
beating of the clenched fists on my side or back. Sometimes she
would cry and give vent to a great deal of self-pity. Once or twice
she even snuggled into bed with me. Sometimes she would open the
door to my room and turn up the phonograph in the living room
until the joint shook. But no soap. I could sleep through anything,
or just about.

Then the morning came when I opened my eyes and felt the
finger of Fate upon me; I knew the time had come. I got up and
packed my suitcase and walked out the door and didn’t come back.
To the slick apartment and to Lois who was beautiful and to whom
I was so perfectly adjusted.

I never saw her again, but I know what she looks like now when
cocktails, bonbons, late hours, and nearly forty years have done
their work on the peach bloom of cheeks, the pearly, ripe but vigor-
ous bosom, the supple midriff, the brooding, black, velvety-liquid
eyes, the bee-stung lips, the luxurious thighs. She sits on a divan
somewhere, held more or less in shape by the vigor of a masseuse
and the bands of lastex which secretly sheathe her like a mummy,
but bloated with the entire universe she has ingurgitated with a
long delicious sigh. And now with a hand on which the pointed
nails are as red as though she had just used them to rip greedily the
guts from a yet living sacrificial fowl, she reaches out to a silver dish

325

to pick up a chocolate. And while the chocolate is }et in mid-air, the
lower lip drops open and beyond tlie purplish tint of the micro-
scopically scaling veneer of lipstick, one sees the damp, paler red,
expectant membranes of the mouth, and the faint glitter of a gold
filling in the dark, hot orifice.

Good-bye, Lois, and I forgive you for everything I did to you.

As for the way Anne Stanton went meanwhile, the story is short.
After two years at the refined female college in Virginia she came
home, Adam by this time was m medical school up East, Anne spent
a year going to parties m the city% and got engaged. But nothing
came of it. He was a decent, intelligent, prosperous fellow, too.
After a while there was another engagement, but something hap-
pened again. By this time Governor Stanton was nearly an invalid,
and Adam was studying abroad. Anne quit going to parties, except
an occasional party at the Landing in the summer. She stayed at
home with her father, giving him his medicine, patting his pillow,
assisting the nurse, reading to him hour by hour, holding his hand
in the summer twilights or in the winter evenings when the house
shook to the blasts off the sea. It took him seven years to die. After
the Governor had died in the big tester bed with a lot of expensive
medical talent leaning over him, Anne Stanton lived in the house
fronting tlie sea, with only the company of Aunt Sophonisba, a
feeble, grumbling, garrulous, and incompetent old colored woman,
who combined benevolence and a vengeful tyranny in the ambigu-
ous way known only to old colored women who have spent their
lives in affectionate service, in prying, wheedling, and chicanery, in
short-lived rebelliousness and long irony, and in secondhand clothes.
Then Aunt Sophonisba died, too, and Adam came back from
abroad, loaded wdth academic distinctions and fanatically devoted
to his work. Shortly after his return, Anne moved to the city to be
near him. By this time she was pushing thirty.

She lived alone in a small apartment in the city. Occasionally she
had lunch with some woman who had been a friend of her girlhood
but who now inhabited another world. Occasionally she went to a
party, at the house of one of the women or at the country club. She
became engaged for a third time, this time to a man seventeen or
eighteen years older than she, a widower with several children, a
substantial lawyer, a pillar of society. He was a good man. He was
still vigorous and rather handsome. He even had a sense of humor.
But she did not marry him. More and more, as the years passed, she
devoted herself to sporadic reading-biography (Daniel Boone or
Marie Antoinette), what is called ‘‘good fiction,’" books on social

326

betterment— and to work without pay for a settlement house and an
orphanage. She kept her looks very well and continued, in a rather
severe way, to pay attention to her dress. There were moments now
when her laugh sounded a little hollow and brittle, the laughter of
nerves not of mirth or good spirits. Occasionally in a conversation
she seemed to lose track and fall into a self-absorption, to start up
overwhelmed by embarrassment and unspoken remorse. Occasion-
ally, too, she practiced the gesture of lifting her hands to her brow,
one on each side, the fingers just touching the skin or lifting back
the hair, the gesture of a delicate distraction. She was pushing
thirty-five. But she could still be good company.

That was the Anne Stanton whom Willie Stark had picked out,
who had finally betrayed me, or rather, had betrayed an idea of
mine which had had more importance for me than I had ever real-
ized.

That was why I had got into my car and headed west, because
when you don’t like it where you are you always go west. We have
always gone west.

That was why I drowned in West and relived my life like a home
movie.

That was why I came to lie on a bed in a hotel in Long Beach,
California, on the last coast amid the grandeurs uf nature. For that
is where you come, after you have crossed oceans and eaten stale
biscuits w^hile prisoned forty days and nights in a storm-tossed rat-
trap, after you have sweated in the greenery and heard the savage
whoop, after you have built cabins and cities and bridged rivers,
after you have lain with women and scattered children like millet
seed in a high wind, after you have composed resonant documents,
made noble speeches, and bathed your arms in blood to the elbows,
after you have shaken with malaria in the marshes and in the icy
wind across the high plains. That is where you come, to lie alone
on a bed in a hotel room in Long Beach, California. W^ere I lay,
while outside my window a neon sign flickered on and off to the
time of my heart, systole and diastole, flushing and flushing again
the gray sea mist with a tint like blood.

I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted
down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze on the sea floor
of History. Lying there, I had what I thought then was a fine per-
spective on my own history, and saw that the girl I had known that
summer a long time back hadn’t been beautiful and charming but
had merely been smooth-faced and healthy, and though she had
sung songs to Jackie-Bird while she cradled his head on her breast,
she hadn’t loved him, but had merely had a mysterious itch in the

327

blood and he was handy and the word love w^as a word for the mys-
terious itch. And that she had been tormented by the m}sterious
itch and torn between its impulse and fear, and that ail her with-
holdments and hesitations had not been prompted by some dream
of making “love mean something’* and making me understand that
dream but that they had been prompted by all the fears tvhich the
leaning, sibilant, sour-breathed old dough -faces of conventional so-
ciety had whispered into her ear like fairy godmothers w’hile she
lay in her cradle, and that those withholdments and hesitations
were no better or worse than the hottest surrender nor better or
worse than those wdthhoidments practiced by Lois for other ends.
And in the end you could not tell Anne Stanton from Lois Seager,
for they were alike, and though the mad poet William Blake wTote
a poem to tell the Adversary who is Prince of This World that He
could not ever change Kate into Nan, the mad poet was quite
wTong, for anybody could change Kate into Nan, or if indeed the
Prince couldn’t change Kate into Nan it was only because Kate and
Nan tvere exactly alike to begin with and were, in fact, the same
with only die illusory difference of name, which meant nothing, for
names meant nothing and all the 'words we speak meant nothing
and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the
nerve, like a dead frog’s leg in the experiment when the electric
current goes through. So when I lay there on the bed in Long
Beach, and shut my eyes, I saw in the inward darkness as in mire
the vast heave and contortion of numberless bodies, and limbs de-
tached from bodies, sweating and perhaps bleeding from inexhaus-
ible wounds. But finally this spectacle, which I could summon up
by the mere act of closing my eyes, seemed merely funny to me. So
I laughed out loud.

I laughed out loud, and then after watching for some time the
rhythmic flushing of the sea mist by the neon sign, I went to sleep.
\^en I woke up I made ready to go back to the place and the
things I had come from.

Years before, a young girl had lain there naked on the iron bed
in my room with her eyes closed and her hands folded over her
breast, and I had been so struck by the pathos of her submissiveness
and her trust in me and of the moment which would plunge her
into the full, dark stream of the world that I had hesitated before
laying my hands upon her and had, without understanding myself,
called out her name. At that time I had had no words for what I
felt, and now, too, it is difficult to find them. But lying there, she
had seemed to be again the little girl who had, on the day of the
picnic, floated on the waters of the bay, with her eyes closed under

328

the stormy and grape-purple sky and the single white gull passing
over, very high. As she lay there that image came into my head, and
I had wanted to call her name, to tell her something— what, I did
not know. She trusted me, but perhaps for that moment of hesita-
tion I did not trust myself, and looked back upon the past as some-
thing precious about to be snatched away from us and was afraid of
the future. I had not understood then what I think I have now
come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the
future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore I lacked some
essential confidence in the world and in myself. She came, as time
passed, to suspect this fact about me. I do not know that she had
words to describe the fact to herself. Or she only had the easy words
people gave her: wanting to have a job, studying law, doing some-
thing.

We went different ways in the world, as I have said, but I nad
with me always that image of the little girl on the waters of the bay,
all innocence and trustfulness, under the stormy sky. Then, there
came the day when that image was taken from me. I learned that
Anne Stanton had become the mistress of Willie Stark, that some-
how by an obscure and necessary logic I had handed her over to
him. That fact was too horrible to face, for it robbed me of some-
thing out of the past by which, unwittingly until that moment, I
had been living.

So I fled west from the fact, and in the West, at the end of His-
tory, the Last Man on that Last Coast, on my hotel bed, I had dis-
covered the dream. That dream was the dream that all life is but
the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee
as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is the
dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and hoiTible, but
in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At
least, it was so for me for a certain time. It was bracing because
after the dream I felt that, in a way, Anne Stanton did not exist.
The words Anne Stanton were simply a name for a peculiarly com-
plicated piece of mechanism whidi should mean nothing whatso-
ever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather com-
plicated piece at mechanism. At that time, when I first discovered
that view of things— really discovered, in my own way and not from
any book— I felt that i had discovered the secret source of all
strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems.

At first It was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after
the dream there is no reascm why you should not go back and face
the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that
you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne

320

Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will
now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as
well go back, after ail, to the place where you belong, for nothing
was your fault or anybody’s fault, for things are always as they are.
And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two
very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never
had. S^econd, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not
commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after alL
If you believe the dream you dream when you go there.

Chapter Eight

so HAVING lain on the bed in Long Beach, California, and seen
what I had seen, I rose, much refreshed, and headed back with the
morning sun in my face. It threw in my direction the shadows of
white or pink or baby-blue stucco bungalows (Spanish mission,
Moorish, or American-cute in style), the shadows of filling stations
resembling the gingerbread house of fairy tale or Anne Hathaway's
cottage or an Eskimo igloo, the shadows of palaces gleaming on hills
among the arrogant traceries of eucalyptus, the shadows of leonine
hunched mountains, the shadow of a boxcar forgotten on a lonely
siding, and the shadow of a man walking toward me on a white
road out of the distance which glittered like quartz. It threw the
beautiful purple shadow of the whole world in my direction, as I
headed back, but I kept right on going, at high speed, for if you
have really been to Long Beach, California, and have had your
dream on the hotel bed, then there is no reason why you should
not return with a new confidence to wherever you came from, for
now you know, and knowledge is power.

You can put your throttle to the floor and let the sixty-horse-
power mystery whine like a wolfhound straining on leash.

I passed the man who was walking toward me, and his face
whirled away like a scrap of paper in a gale or boyhood hopes. And
I laughed out loud.

I saw the people walking in the plaza of little towns in the desert.
I saw the waitress in the restaurant wave in feeble protest at the fly
while the electric fan needled the air which was as thin and hot as
the breath of a blast furnace. I saw the traveling salesman who
stood at the hotel desk just ahead of me and said, ‘'You call this a
hotel, bud, and me wiring for a room and bath and you ain't held
it. It's a wonder you got a room and bath in a burg like this." I saw
the sheepherder standing alone on an enormous mesa. I saw the
Indian woman with eyes the color of blackstrap molasses looking
at me over a pile of pottery decorated with the tribal symbols of life

and fertility and eminently designed for the five-and-ten-cent-store
trade. As I looked at all these people I felt great strength in my
fciecret knowledge.

I remembered how once, long back when Willie Stark had been
the dummy and the sap, at the time when he was Cousin Willie from
the country and was running for governor the first time, I had gone
over to the flea-bitten west part of the state to cover the barbecue
and speaking at Upton, I had gone on the local, w^hich had yawed
and puffed for hours across the cotton fields and then across the
sagebrush. At one little town where it stopped, I had looked out of
the window^ and thought hotv the board or wdre fences around the
little board houses were inadequate to keep out the openness of the
humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and
eat up the houses. I had thought how the houses didn't look as
though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be
abandoned, with the scraps of washing still on the line, for there
W’ouldn't be time to grab it off when the people finally realized they
had to go and go quick. I had had that thought, but just as the train
was pulling out, a woman had come to the back door of one of the
nearest houses to fling out a pan of water. She flings the water out,
then looks a moment at the train drawing away, then deliberately
enters the house. She is not going to run away. She is going into the
house to some secret which is there, some knowledge. And as the
train pulled away, I had had the notion that I was the one running
away and had better run fast for it was going to be dark soon. I had
thought of that woman as having a secret knowledge, and had en-
vied her. I had often envied people. People I had seen fleetingly, or
some pec pie I had known a long time, a man driving a long,
straight furrow across a black field in April, or Adam Stanton. I
had, at moments, envied the people who seemed to have a secret
knowledge.

But now, as I whirled eastward, over desert, under the shadow
of mountains, by mesas, across plateaus, and saw the people in that
magnificent empty country, I did not think that I would ever have
to envy anybody again, for I was sure that now I had the secret
knowledge, and with knowledge you can face up to anything, for
knowledge is power.

In a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man
propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the
only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old
fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and
pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been
black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while

332

you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, which seemed
as stiflE and devitalized as the hide on a mummy’s jaw, you w^ould
suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye.
You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn’t going to
wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unre-
lated to the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in
the whole tissue of phenomena w^hich is the world we are lost in.
It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lived that little
life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat on a bundle of
rags from which the handle of a tin skillet protruded, and listened
to him talk. But the words were not alive. What w^as alive was the
twitch, of which he was no longer aware.

After my tank had been filled, I continued to watch that twitch,
with glances stolen from the highway, as we sat side by side in the
car and hurtled eastward. He was going east, too, going back. That
was back in the days when the dust storms were blowing half the
country away and folks headed west like the lemmings on a ram-
page. Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the
lemmings. They did not start swimming in teeming, obsessed hordes
straight out to the middle of the blue Pacific. That would have
been the logical thing for them to do, just start swimming, pa and
ma, grandpa and grandma, and Baby Rosebud with the ruxming
sore on her little chin, the whole kit and kaboodle of ’em, flailing
the water to a froth and heading out. But, no, they were not like
the lemmings, and so they just sat down and starv^ed slowly in Cali-
fornia. But this old fellow didn’t. He was going back to north
Arkansas to starve where he had come from. ‘‘Californy,” he said,
“hit is jes lak the rest of the world, only it is more of hit.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “that is a fact.”

“You been thar?” he demanded.

I told him I had been there.

“You goen back home?” he asked.

I told him I was going home.

We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me
to try for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the
truth in California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the
final wisdom under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was
the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremark-
able man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which
made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that
could know that the twitch was all? Bid the leg of the dead frog in
the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the elec-
tric current through it? Did the man’s face know about the twitch,

333

and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which
was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mys-
tery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to
California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can
know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the
mystic vision, }ou feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great
Twitch.

So I kept on riding east, and after long enough I was home.

I got back, late at night, and went to bed. The next morning I
turned up at the office, well rested and well shaved, and strolled in
to say howdy-do to the Boss. I had a great desire to see him, to ob-
serve him closely and find if there was anything in his make-up
which I had previously missed. I had to look at him very closely, for
he was the man who had everything now, and I had nothing. Or
rather, I corrected myself, he had everything, except the thing I had,
the great thing, the secret. So I corrected myself, and in much the
mood of a priest who looks down with benign pity on the sweat and
striving, I entered the Governor's office, and walked past the recep-
tionist and, with a perfunctory knock, into the inside.

There he was, and he hadn’t changed a bit.

“Hello, Jack,” he said, and swiped the forelock out of his eyes
and swung his feet off the desk and came toward me, putting out his
hand, “where the hell you been, boy?”

“Out West,” I said, with elaborate casualness, taking the prof-
fered hand. “Just drove out West. I got sort of fed up round here,
so I took me a little vacation.”

“Have a good time?”

“I had a wonderful time,” I said.

“Fine,” he said.

“How you been making out?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said, “everything is fine.”

And so I had come home to the place where everything was fine.
Everything was fine just the way it had been before I left, except
that now I knew the secret. And my seoret knowledge cut me off. If
you have the secret, you cannot really communicate any more with
somebody who has not got it, any more than you can really com-
municate with a bustling vitamin-crammed brat who is busy with
his building blocks or a tin drum. And you can’t take somebody off
to one side and tell him the secret. If you do that, then the fellow,
or female, you are trying to tell the truth to thinks you are feeling
sorry for yourself and asking for sympathy, when the real case is
that you are not asking for sympathy but for congratulations. So I

334

did my daily tasks and ate my daily bread and saw the old familiar
faces, and smiled benignly like a priest.

It was June, and hot. Every night, except those nights when I
went to sit in an air-conditioned movie, I went to my room after
dinner and stripped buck-naked and lay on the bed, witli an electric
fan burring and burrowing away into my brain, and read a book
until the time when I would become aware that the sound of the
city had sunk off to almost nothing but tlie single hoot of a taxi far
off or the single lost clang and grind of a streetcar, an owl car head-
ing out. Then I would reach up and switch off the light and roll
over and go to sleep with the fan still burring and burrowing.

I did see Adam a few times in June. He was more deeply imolved
than before in the work of the medical center, more grimly and icily
driving himself. There was, of course, some letup in the work at the
University with the end of term, but whatever relief was there, was
more than made up for by an increase in his private practice and
work at the clinic. He said he was glad to see me when I went to his
apartment, and maybe he was, but he didn’t have much to say, and
as I sat there he would seem to be drawing deeper and deeper into
himself until I had the feeling that I was trying to talk to somebody
down a well and had better holler if I wanted to be understood.
The only time he perked up was one night when, after he had re-
marked on the fact that he was to perform an operation the next
morning, I asked about the case.

It was a case of catatonic schizophrenia, he said.

“You mean he is a nut?” I asked.

Adam grinned and allowed that that wasn’t too far wrong.

“I didn’t know you cut on folks for being nutty,” I said. “I
thought you just humored and gave them cold baths and let them
make raffia baskets and got them to tell you their dreams.”

“No,” he said, “you can cut on them.” Then he added, almost
apologetically, “A prefrontal lobectomy.”

“What’s that?”

“You remove a piece of the frontal lobe of the brain on each
side,” he said.

I asked would the fellow live. He said you never could tell for
sure, but if he did live he would be different.

I asked how did he mean, different.

“Oh, a different personality,” he replied.

“Like after you get converted and baptized?”

“That doesn’t give you a different personality,” he said. *TVhen
you get converted you still have the same personality. You merely
exercise it in terms of a different set of values.”

335

"*But this fellow will have a different personality?’’

"Tes,” Adam said. ‘‘The way he is now he simply sits on a chair
or lies on his back on a bed and stares into space. His brow is
creased and furrowed. Occasionally he utters a low moan or an ex-
clamation. In some sucii cases 'we discover the presence of delusions
of persecution. But always the patient seems to experience a numb-
ing, grinding misery. But after we are through with him he will be
different. He will be relaxed and cheerful and friendly. He will
smooth his brow. He will sleep w^ell and eat w^ell and will love to
hang over the back fence and compliment die neighbors on their
nasturtiums and cabbages. He will be perfectly happy.”

“If you can guarantee results like that,” I said, “you ought to do
a land-office business. As soon as the news gets round.”

“You can’t ever guarantee anything,” Adam said.

“What happens if it doesn’t come out according to Hoyle?”

“Well,” he said, “there have been cases~not mine, thank God—
where the patient didn’t become cheerfully extroverted but became
completely and cheerfully amoral.”

“You mean he would throw the nurses down right on the floor in
broad daylight?”

“About that,” Adam said. “If you’d let him. All the ordinary
inhibitions disappeared.”

“Weil, if your guy tomorrow comes out like that he will certainly
be an asset to society.”

Adam grinned sourly, and said, “He won’t be any worse than a
lot of other people who haven’t been cut on.”

“Can I see the cutting?” I asked. I felt all of a sudden that I had
to see it. I had never seen an operation. As a newspaperman, I had
seen three hangings and one electrocution, but they are different.
In a hanging you do not change a man’s personality. You just
change the length of his neck and give him a quizzical expression,
and in an electrocution you just cook some bouncing meat in a
wholesale lot. But this operation was going to be more radical even
than what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus. So I asked
could I see the operation.

“Why?” Adam asked, studying my face.

I told him it was plain curiosity.

He said, all right, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

“It will be as pretty as a hanging, I guess,” I replied.

Then he started to tell me about the case. He drew me pictures
and he got down books. He perked up considerably and almost
talked my ear off. He was so interesting that I forgot to ask him a
question which had flitted through my mind earlier in our con*

336

versation. He had said that in the case of a religious conversion the
personality does not change, that it is merely exercised in terms of
a different set of values. Well, I had meant to ask him how, if there
was no change in personality, how did the person get a different set
of values to exercise his personality in terms of? But it slipped my
mind at the time.

Anyway, I saw the operation.

Adam got me rigged up so I could go right down in the pit with
him. They brought in the patient and put him on the table. He
was a hook-nosed, sour-faced, gaunt individual who reminded me
vaguely of Andrew Jackson or a back-country evangelist despite the
white turban on his head made out of sterile towels. But that tur-
ban was pushed pretty far back at a jaunty angle, for the front part
of his head was exposed. It had been shaved. They put the mask
on him and knocked him out. Then Adam took a scalpel and cut a
neat little cut across the top of the head and down at each temple,
and then just peeled the skin off the bone in a neat flap forward.
He did a job that would have made a Comanche brave look like a
tyro with a scalping knife. Meanwhile, they were sopping up the
blood, which was considerable.

Then Adam settled down to the real business. He had a contrap-
tion like a brace and bit. With that he drilled five or six holes— burr
holes they call them in the trade— on each side of the skull. Then
he started to work with what he had told me earlier was a Gigli saw,
a thing which looked like a coarse wire. With that he sawed on the
bone till he had a flap loose on each side of the front of the head
and could bend the flap down and get at the real mechanism inside.
Or could as soon as he had cut the pale little membrane which they
call the meninges.

By that time it had been more than an hour, or so it seemed to
me, and my feet hurt. It was hot in there, too, but I didn't get upset,
even with the blood. For one thing, the man there on the table
didn't seem real. I forgot that he was a man at all, and kept watch-
ing the high-grade carpenter work which was going on. I didn’t pay
much attention to the features of the process which did indicate
that the thing on the table was a man. For instance, the nurse kept
on taking blood-pressure readings and now and then she would
mess with the transfusion apparatus— for they were giving the
patient a transfusion all the time out of a bottle rigged up on a
stand with a tube coming down.

I did fine until they started the burning. For taking out the
chunks of brain they use an electric gadget which is nothing but a
little metal rod stuck in a handle with an electric cord coming out

3$7

of the handle. The whole thing looks like an electric curling iron. In
fact, all the way through I was struck by the notion that all the ex-
pensive apparatus was so logical and simple and homey, and re-
minded me so completely of the stuff around any well-equipped
household. By ransacking the kitchen and your wdfe’s dressing table
you can get together in five minutes enough of a kit to set up in
business for yourself.

Weil, in the process of eiectrocautery this little rod does the trick
of cutting, or rather burning. And there is some smoke and quite
a lot of odor. At least, it seemed like a lot to me. At first it wasn't
so bad, but then I knew where I had smelled an odor like that be-
fore. It was the night, long back when I was a kid, when the old
livery stable had burned down at the Landing and they hadn't
managed to get all the horses out. The smell of the cooking horses
was on the still, damp, ripe night air and you couldn’t forget it,
even after you didn't hear any more the shrieks the horses had
made. As soon as I realized tliat the burning brain had a smell like
the burning horses, I didn't feel good.

But I stuck it out. It took a long time, hours more, for they can’t
cut but a little bit of brain at a time, and have to keep working
deeper and deeper. I stuck it out until Adam had sewed up the
meninges and had pulled the skull flaps back into place and had
drawn up the flap of skin and laced it down all shipshape.

Then the little pieces of brain which had been cut out were put
away to think their little thoughts quietly somewhere among the
garbage, and what was left inside the split-open skull of the gaunt
individual was sealed back up and left to think up an entirely new
personality.

When Adam and I went out, and he was washing up and we were
getting our white nightshirts off, I said to him, “Well, you forgot
to baptize him."

“Baptize him?" Adam asked, sliding out of the white nightshirt.

“Yeah," I said, “for he is born again and not of woman. I baptize
thee in the name of the Big Twitch, the Little Twitch, and the
Holy Ghost. Who, no doubt, is a Twitch, too."

“What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded,

“Nothing," I said, “I was just trying to be funny."

Adam put on a faint, indulgent smile, but he didn’t seem to think
it was very funny. And looking back on it, I can't find it very funny
myself. But I thought it was funny at the time. I thought it would
bust a gut. But that summer from the height of my Olympian wis-
dom, I seemed to find a great many things funny which now do not
appear quite as funny.

After the operation I did not see anything of Adam for quite a
while. He went out of town, up East, on business, on some of the
hospital business, I supposed. Then, shortly after he got back, the
thing happened which just about left the Boss in the position of
having to hunt up a new director.

What happened was simple and predictable. One night Adam
and Anne, who had had dinner together, mounted the stairs of the
crummy apartment house to spy, on the landing before the door, a
tali, thin, white-clad figure with a white Panama hat on its head,
a cigar glowing in the shadow out of one side of the place w’^here
the mouth would be and putting out an expensive aroma to com-
pete with the cabbage. The fellow took the white hat off, tucked it
lightly under an elbow, and asked if Adam was Dr. Stanton. Adam
said he was- So the fellow said his name was Coffee (the name is
Hubert Coffee) and asked if he could come in for a minute.

Adam and Anne went in, and Adam asked the fellow what he
wanted. He stood there in his white, well-pressed suit and two-color
shoes with, no doubt, intricate stitchings and ventilators in the
leather (for I have found Hubert to be quite a dude—two white
suits a day, and white silk shorts with red monograms, they say, and
red silk socks and trick shoes), and hummed and hawed out of his
knobby, long, squash-yellow face, and coughed discreetly, and sig-
nificantly rolled his brown eyes (which are the color and texture of
used motor oil) in the direction of Anne. Anne told me later, for
she is my authority for the event, that she thought he was coming
about being sick, so she excused herself and went back to the
kitchen to put into the electric icebox a little carton of ice cream
she had picked up at the corner drugstore. She was planning on a
quiet little evening with Adam. (Though her quiet little visits with
Adam that summer must have been less than restful for her. She
must have always had in the back of her mind the question about
what would happen when Adam found out how she was spending
some of her other evenings. Or was she able to lock off that part of
her mind, the way you lock off some of the rooms of a big house,
and just sit in the cozy, or perhaps not now so cozy, parlor? And sit-
ting there, did she listen always for the creak of floor or the cease-
less tread of feet in the locked-off rooms upstairs?)

After she had put the ice cream away, she noticed that some dirty
dishes were piled up in the sink. So to keep out from under foot in
the apartment while the men conferred she set about washing the
dishes. She had about wound up the dishes, when suddenly the in-
comprehensible drone of voices stopped. The sudden silence was
what she noticed. Then there was a dry thump (that was the way

339

she described it), and her brother's voice saving, '‘Get out!” Then
there 'U’as the sound of rapid motion and the slamming of the apart-
ment door.

She went into the living room to find Adam standing in tlie mid-
dle of the floor, very white in the face, nursing his right hand in
his left across his stomach, and staring at the door. When Anne
came in, he turned his head slowly to her and said, “I hit him. I
didn’t mean to hit him. I never hit anybody before.”

He must have hit Hubert pretty hard, too, for his knuckle was
split and swelling. Adam had a good weight of shoulder even if he
was slender. Anyway he stood tliere nursing his split knuckle and
wearing an expression of blank incredulity on his face. The in-
credulity, apparently, 'was at his own behavior.

Anne, very much agitated, asked him what was the trouble.

The trouble was, as I have suggested, simple and predictable.
Gummy Larson had sent Hubert Coffee, who, on account of his
white suits and silk monogrammed drawers, was supposed to have
finesse and the gentlemanly approach, to try to persuade Dr. Stan-
ton to use his influence to get the Boss to throw the basic medical-
center contract to Larson. Adam didn’t know all of this, for we can
be quite sure that Hubert had not named the behind-guy in the
exploratory stages of the interview. But as soon as I heard the name
Coffee I knew that it was Larson. Hubert never got past the ex-
ploratory stages of the interview. But, apparently, he handled those
stages rather broadly. At first, Adam didn’t get what he was driving
at, and Hubert must have decided that any of his high-priced
subtlety would be wasted on this dumb cluck and moved pretty
directly to the point. He got as far as the idea that there w^ouid be
some candy in it for Adam, before he finally touched the button
which set off the explosion.

Still caught in the incredulity and nursing the numbed hand,
Adam stood there and in a distant voice told Anne what had hap-
pened. Then, having finished he leaned down to pick up, with the
good left hand, die cigar stub, which was slowly burning a hole in
the old green carpet. He walked across the carpet, holding the stink-
ing stub out at some length, and flung it into the fireplace, which
still had in it (as I had noticed on my visits) the ashes of the last
fire of spring and bits of paper and orange peel from the summer.
Then he walked back across the carpet, and ground his foot on the
smoldering place, probably with a kind of symbolic savagery. At
least, I could imagine that picture.

He went to his desk, sat down, took out pen and paper, and be-
gan to write. When he had finished, he swung round to Anne, and

340

announced tliat he had just witten his resignation. She didn't say
an) thing. Not a word. She knew, she told me, that there wasn't any
use tr)ing to argue with him, to point out to him that it w'asn’t the
fault of Governor Stark or the fault of the job that some crook had
come and tried to bribe him. She knew from looking at his face that
there wasn't any use in talking. In other w^ords, he must have been
in the gi'ip of an instinctive withdrawal, tvhich took the form of
moral indignation and moral revulsion, but which, no doubt, was
different from either, and more deep-seated than either, and finally
irrational. He got up from the chair, and took a few strides about
the room, apparently in great excitement. He seemed almost gay,
Anne said, as though he were about to burst out laughing. He
seemed happy that the whole thing had happened. Then he picked
up the letter and stamped it,

Anne was afraid that he would go out immediately to mail it, for
he stood there in the middle of the floor, fingering it as though de-
bating the issue. But he did not go out. Instead, he propped it on
the mantelpiece, took a few more turns about the apartment, then
flung himself down on the piano bench and started to beat out the
music. He sat there and beat it for more than two hours in a breath-
less July night, and the sweat ran down his face. Anne sat there,
afraid, she told me, and not knowing what she was afraid of.

When he got through, and turned his sweat-streaked white face
toward her, she fetched the ice cream and they had a jolly little
family party. Then she went out and got into her car and drove
home.

She telephoned me. I met her at an all-night drugstore, and across
the imitation-marble top of the table in the booth, I saw her for the
first time since the morning in May when she had stood at the door
of her apartment and had read the question in my face and had
slowly and wordlessly nodded the answer. When I heard her voice
on the telephone that night, my heart took the little leap and ker-
plunk, like the frog into the lily pond, just as it had before, and
for the moment what had happened might as well not have hap»
pened. But it had happened, and what I had now as my cab wheeled
me down-town to the all-night drugstore, was the wry and bilious
satisfaction that I was being called on for some special reason the
other fellow couldn't be expected to answer. But the satisfaction
forgot even to be wry and bilious and was, for the moment, just
simple sat^'sfaction when I stepped out of the cab and saw her stand-
ing inside the glass doors of the drugstore, a trim erect figure in a
light-green polka-dot dress with some kind of a white jacket hung
across one of her bare arms. I tried to make out the expression on

341

her face, but before I could discover what it was, she spied me and
smiled.

It was a tentative, apologetic sort of smile, which said please and
thank you and at the same time expressed an innocent and absolute
confidence that your better nature would triumph. I walked across
the hot pavement toward that smile and the green polka-dot figure
which stood there behind the glass like something put in a show-
case for you to admire but not touch. Then I laid my hand on the
glass of the door, and pushed, and left the street, wdiere the air was
hot and sticky like a Turkish bath and where the smell of gasoline
fumes mixed with the brackish, dead-sweet smell of the river which
crept into the city on still nights in summer, and entered the bright,
crisp, antiseptic, cool w^orld behind the glass where the smile was,
for there is nothing brighter, crisper, more antiseptic, and cooler
than a really first-rate corner drugstore on a hot summer night. If
Anne Stanton is inside the door and the air conditioning is working.

The smile w^as on me and the eyes looked straight at me and she
put out her hand. I took it, thought how cool and small and firm
it was, as tliough I were just discovering the fact, and heard her say,
*'It looks like I’m always calling you up, Jack.”

“Oh, that’s O.K.,” I said, and released the hand.

It couldn’t have been more than an instant we stood there then
without saying anything, but it seemed a long and painfully embar-
rassed time, as if neither of us knew what to say, before she said,
“Let’s sit down.”

I started to move back toward the booths. Out of the tail of my
eye, I noticed that she made a motion, quickly suppressed, to hang
on to my arm. As I noticed that fact, the satisfaction which had
been for the moment simple satisfaction, was again merely the wry
and bilious satisfaction with which I had started out. And it stayed
that kmd, as I sat in the booth and looked at her face which was
not smiling now and was showing the tensions and the tightness of
the skin o\er the fine bone and showing, I suppose, the years that
had gone by since the summer when we sat in the roadster and she
sang to Jackie-Bird, and promised never to let anybody hurt poor
Jackie-Bird. Well, she had kept her promise, all right, for Jackie-
Bird had flown away that summer, before the fall came, to some
place with a better climate where nobody would ever hurt him, and
he had never come back. At least, I had never seen him since.

Now she sat in the booth and told me, over our glasses of Coca
Cola, what had happened in Adam’s apartment.

“What do you w^ant me to do?” I asked, when she got through.

“You know,” she said.

342

^‘You want me to make him stick to it?”

‘Tes,” she said.

‘It’ll be hard.”

She nodded.

“It’ll be hard,” I said, “because he is acting perfectly crazy. The
only thing I can prove to him is that if this Coffee bastard tried to
bribe him it only indicates that the job is on the level as long as
Adam wants to keep it that way. It only indicates, furthermore, that
somebody farther up the line had declined to take a bribe, too. It
even indicates that Tiny Duffy is an honest man, “Or,” I added,
“hasn’t been able to deliver the goods.”

“You will try?” she asked.

“I’ll try,” I said, “but don’t get your hopes up. I can only prove
to Adam what he would already know if he hadn’t gone crazy. He
just has the high cantankerous moral shrinks. He does not like to
play with the rough boys. He is afraid they might dirty his Lord
Fauntleroy suit.”

“That’s not fair,” she burst out.

I shrugged, then said, “Well, I’ll try, anyway,”

“What will you do?”

“There is only one thing to do. I’ll go to Governor Stark, get him
to agree to arrest Coffee on the grounds of attempted bribery of an
official— Adam is an official, you know— and call on Adam to swear
to the charges. If he’ll swear to them. That ought to make him see
how things line up. That ought to show him the Boss will protect
him. And—” to that point I had only been thinking of the Adam
end but now my mind got to work on the possibilities of the situa-
tion—“it wouldn’t do the Boss any harm to hang a rap on Coffee.
Particularly if he will squeal on the behind-guy. He might bust up
Larson. And with Larson out, MacMurfee wouldn’t mean much.
He might hang it on Coffee, too, if you—” And I stopped dead.

“If I what?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I said, and felt the way you do when you are driving
merrily across the drawbridge, and all at once the span starts up.

“What?” she demanded,

I looked into her level eyes and saw the way her jaw was set, and
knew that I might as well say it. She would work on me till she had
it. So I said it. “If you will testify,” I said.

“I’ll do it,” she said without hesitation.

I shook my head. “No,” I said.

“I’ll do it.”

“No, it won’t wash.”

“Why?”

343

“It just won't. After all, you didn't see anything."

“I was there."

“It would just be hearsay testimony. Absolutely tiiat. It would
never stand up."

“I don't know," she said. “I don't know about those things. But
I know this. I know that isn't die reason you changed your mind.
What made you change your mind?"

“You never have been on a witness stand. You don't know what
it is to have a mean, smart law7er saw at you while you sweat."

“I’ll do it," she said.

“No."

“I don't mind."

“Listen here," I said, and shut my eyes and took the plunge off
the end of the open drawbridge, “if you think Coffee’s lawyer
wouldn’t have plenty on the ball you are crazy as Adam. He would
be mean and he would be smart and he would not have one
damned bit of fine old Southern chivalry.”

“You mean—" she began, and I knew from her face that she had
caught the point.

“Exactly," I said. “Nobody may know anything now, but when
the fun started they would know everything."

“I don't care," she affirmed, and lifted her chin up a couple of
notches. I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the
tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by that abso-
lutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time tnrows
around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it. The cord is so
gossamer that it breaks every day, but the marks get there finally,
and finally one day the gossamer cord doesn't break and is enough.
I looked at the marks when Anne lifted her chin, and realized that
I had never noticed them before and would always notice them
again. I suddenly felt awful—literally sick, as though I had been
socked in the stomach, or as though I had met a hideous betrayal.
Then before I knew it, the way I felt changed into anger, and I
lashed out,

“Yeah," I said, “you don't care, but you forget one thing. You
forget that Adam will be sitting right there looking at little sister.”

Her face was white as a sheet.

Then she lowered her head a little and was looking at her hands,
which were clenched together now around the empty Coca Cola
glass. Her head was low enough so tliat I could not see her eyes,
only the lids coming down over them.

“My dear, my dear/' I murmured. Then as I seized her hands

344

pressed around the glass, the words wrenched out of me, *‘Oh, Anne,
why did you do it?*'

It was the one question I had never meant to ask.

For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her
eyes, she said in a low voice, *‘He wasn’t like anybody else. Not
anybody else I’d ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess.
I guess that is the reason.”

I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.

She said, “Then you told me— you told me about my father.
There wasn’t any reason why not then. After you told me.”

I reckoned I had asked for that one, too.

She said, “He wants to marry me.”

“Are you going to?”

“Not now. It would hurt him. A divorce would hurt him. Not
now.”

“Are you going to?”

“Perhaps. Later. After he goes to the Senate. Next year.”

One part of my mind was busy ticketing that away: The Senate
next year. That means he won't let old Scoggan go back. Funny he
hadn't told me. But the other part of my mind which was not the
nice, cool, steel filing cabinet with alphabetical cards was boiling
like a kettle of pitch. A big bubble heaved up and exploded out
of the pitch, and it was my voice saying, “Well, I suppose you know
what you are up to.”

“You don’t know him,” she said, her voice even lower than be»
fore. “You’ve known him all these years and you don’t know him
at all.” Then she had lifted her head and was looking straight into
my eyes. “I’m not sorry,” she said, quite distinctly. “Not for any-
thing that’s happened.”

I walked down the street in the hot darkness toward my hotel
under a magnificent throbbing sky, breathing the old gasoline
fumes the day had left and the sweet, marshy smell of the river
at low water which the night brought up into the streets, and
thinking, yes, I knew why she had done it.

The answer was in all the years before, and the things in them
and not in them.

The answer was in me, for I had told her.

I only told her the truth, I said savagely to myself, and she Lan*t
blame me for the truth!

But was there some fatal appropriateness inherent in the
nature of the world and of me that I should be the one to cell L. r
that truth? I had to ask myself that question, too. And I couldo t

345

be sure o£ the answer. So I walked on down tlie street, turning that
question over and over in my mind without any answer until the
question lost meaning and dropped from my mind as sometliing
heavy drops from numb fingers. I w^ould have faced the responsi-
bility and the guilt, I tvas ready to do that, if I could know. But
who is going to tell you?

So I walked on, and after a while I remembered how she had
said I had never known him. And the him was Willie Stark, whom
I had known for the many years since Cousin Willie from the
country, the Boy with the Christmas Tie, had walked into the back
room of Slade's old place. Sure, I knew him. Like a book. I had
known him a long time.

Too long I thought then, too long to know him. For maybe the
time had blinded me, or rather I had not been aware of the pass-
ing of time and always tlie round face of Cousin Willie had come
between me and the other face so that I had never really seen the
other face. Except perhaps in those moments when it had leaned
forward to the crowds and the forelock had fallen and the eyes
had bulged, and the crowd had roared and I had felt the surge in
me and had felt that I was on the verge of the truth. But always
the face of Cousin Willie above the Christmas tie had come again.

But it did not come now. I saw the face. Enormous. Bigger than
a billboard. The forelock shagged down like a mane. The big jaw.
The heavy lips laid together like masonry. The eyes burning and
bulging powerfully.

Funny, I had never seen it before. Not really.

That night I telephoned the Boss, told him what had happened
and how Anne had told me, and made my suggestion about getting
Adam to swear out a warrant for Coffee. He said to do it. To do
anything that Tvould nail Adam. So I went to the hotel, where I lay
on my bed under the electric fan until the desk called me to get up
at about six o'clock. Then by seven I was on Adam's doorstep, with
a single cup of java sloshing about in my insides and a fresh razor
cut on my chin and sleep like sand under my eyelids.

I worked it. It was a hard little job I had cut out for me. First,
I had to enlist Adam on the side of righteousness by getting him
to agree to swear out a warrant for Coffee. My method was to
assume, of course, that he was aching for the opportunity to nail
Coffee, and to indicate that the Boss was cheering on the glorious
exploit. Then I had to lead him to the discovery, which had to
be all his own, that this would involve Anne as a witness. Then
I had to play the half-wit and imply that this had never occurred

346

to me before. The danger was, with a fellow like Adam, that he
would get so set on seeing justice done that he would let Anne
testify, hell and high water. He almost did that, but I painted a
gory picture of the courtroom scene (but not as gory by half as it
would have been in truth), refused to be party to the business,
hinted that he was an unnatural brother, and w^ound up with a
vague notion of another way to get Coffee for a similar attempt
in another quarter—a vague notion of laying myself open for Coffee
to approach me. I could put out a feeler for him, and all that. So
Adam dropped the idea of tlie charge, but retained the implied
idea that he and the Boss had teamed up to keep things clean for
the hospital.

Just as we w^re ready to walk out of the apartment, he stepped
to the mantelpiece and picked up the stamped letters waiting there
to be mailed. I had spotted the top envelope already, the one ad-
dressed to the Boss. So as he turned around with the letters in his
hand, I simply lifted that one out of his grasp, said with my best
smile, “Hell, you haven’t got any use for this in the daylight,’* and
tore it across and put the pieces into my pocket.

Then we went out back and got into his car. I rode with him
all the way to his office. I would have sat with him all day to keep
an eye on him if it had been possible. Anyway, I chatted briskly
all the way down-town to keep his mind clear. My chatter was as
gay and sprightly as bird song.

So the summer moved on, swelling slowly like a great fruit, and
everything was as it had been before. I went to my office. I went
back to my hotel and sometimes ate a meal and sometimes did not
and lay under the fan and read till late. I saw the same faces, Duffy,
the Boss, Sadie Burke, all the faces I had known for a long time
and saw so often I didn’t notice the changes in them. But I did not
see Adam and Anne for a while. And I had not seen Lucy Stark
for a long time. She was living out in the country now. The Boss
would still go out to see her now and then, to keep up appearances,
and have his picture taken among the white leghorns. Sometimes
Tom Stark would stand there with him and, perhaps, Lucy, with
the white leghorns in the foreground and a wire fence behind.
Governor Willie Stark and Family^ the caption would read.

Yes, those pictures were an asset to the Boss. Half the people in
the state knew that the Boss had been tom-catting around for years,
but the pictures of the family and the white leghorns gave the vot-
ers a nice warm glow, it made them feel solid, substantial, and vir-
tuous, it made them think of gingerbread and nice cold buttermilk,

347

and if somewhere not too far in the wings there was a flicker of a
black-lace negligee and a whiff of musky perfume, then, “Well, you
cain’t blame him a-taken hit, they put hit up to him.” It only
meant that the Boss was having it both ways, and that seemed a
mark of the chosen and superior. It was what the voter did when
he shook loose and came up to town to the furniture dealers’ con-
vention and gave the bellhop a couple of bucks to get him a girl
up to the room. Or if he wasn’t doing it classy, he rode into town
with his truckload of hogs and for tw^o bucks got the whole works
down at a crib. But either way, classy or crib, the voter knew what
it meant, and he wanted both Mom’s gingerbread and the black-
lace negligee and didn’t hold it against the Boss for having both.
What he would have held against the Boss was a divorce. Anne
w^as right about that. It would have hurt even the Boss. That would
have been very different, and would have robbed the voter of
something he valued, the nice warm glow of complacency, the pic-
ture that flattered him and his own fat or thin wife standing in
front of the henhouse.

Meanwhile, if the voter knew that the Boss had been tom-catting
for years, and could name the names of half of the ladies involved,
he didn’t know about Anne Stanton. Sadie had found out, but
that was no miracle. But as far as I could detect, nobody else knew,
not even Duffy with his wheezing, elephantine wit and leer. Maybe
Sugar-Boy knew, but he could be depended upon. He knew every-
thing. The Boss didn’t mind telling anything in front of Sugar-
Boy, or close to it~anything, that is, that he would tell. Which
probably left a lot untold, at that. Once Congressman Randall was
in the Boss’s library with him, Sugar-Boy, and me, pacing up and
down the floor, and the Boss was giving him play-by-play instruc-
tions on how to conduct himself when the Milton-Broderick Bill
was presented to Congress. The instructions were pretty frank, and
the Congressman kept looking nervously at Sugar-Boy. The Boss
noticed him. “God damn it,” the Boss said, “you afraid Sugar-Boy’s
finding out something? Well, you’re right, he’s finding out some-
thing. Well, Sugar-Boy has found out plenty. He knows more about
this state than you do. And I trust him a hell of a lot farther than
Fd trust you. You’re my pal, ain’t you, Sugar-Boy?”

Sugar-Boy’s face darkened with the rush of pleasurable, embar-
rassed blood and his lips began to work and the spit to fly as he
prepared to speak.

“Yeah, Sugar’s my pal, ain’t you, Sugar-Boy?” he said, and slapped
Sugar-Boy on the shoulder, and then swung again toward the Con-

348

gressman while Sugar-Boy finally was managing to say, “I’m— y-y-y-
your pal— and— I— ain’t ta-ta-ta-talking— none.”

Yes, Sugar-Boy probably knew, but he was dependable.

And Sadie was dependable, too. She had told me, but that was
in the flush of her fost fine rage and I (I thought of this with a
certain grim humor) 'was, you might say, in the family. She -w^ouldn’t
tell anybody else. Sadie Burke didn’t have any confidant, for she
didn’t trust anybody. She didn’t ask any sympathy, for the world
she had grown up in didn’t have any. So she w^ould keep her mouth
shut. And she had plenty of patience. She knew he’d come back.
Meanwhile, she could hack him into a rage, or could try to for
it was hard to do, and she herself would get into one, and you
would think that they would be ready to fly at each other in the
frenzy they could build up. By that time, too, you w^ouidn’t be
able to tell whether it was a frenzy of love or hate that coiled and
tangled them together. And after all the years it had been going
on, it probably didn’t matter w^hich it was. Her eyes would blaze
black out of her chalk-white, pocked face and her wild black hair
would seem to lift electrically off her scalp and her hands would
flay out in a gesture of rending and tearing. While the flood of her
language poured over him, his head would rock massively but al-
most imperceptibly from side to side and his eyes would follow her
every motion, at first drowsily, then raptly, until he would heave
himself up, the big veins in his temples pumping and his right fist
raised. Then the raised fist would crash into the palm of the other
hand, and he would burst out, “God damn, God damn it, Sadie!”

Or for weeks there wouldn’t be any shenanigans. Sadie would
treat the Boss with an icy decorum, meeting him only and strictly
in the course of business, standing quietly before him while he
talked. She would stand there before him and study him out of
the black eyes, in which the blaze was banked now. Well, despite ail
the shenanigans, Sadie knew how to wait. She had learned that a
long time back. She had had to wait for everything she had ever
got out of the world.

So the summer went on, and we all lived in it. It was a way to
live, and when you have lived one way for a while you forget that
there was ever any other v/ay and that there may be another way
again. Even when the change came, it didn’t at first seem like a
change but like more of the same, an extension and repetition.

It came through Tom Stark.

Given the elements, it was perfectly predictable. On one hand
there was the Boss, and on the other hand there was MacMurfee.
MacMurfee didn’t have any dioice. He had to keep fighting the

349

Boss, for the Boss wouldn’t deal with him, and if (and it looked
more like when than if) the Boss ever broke MacMurfee in the
Fourth DisU'ict, Mac was a goner. So he had no choice, and he
would use anything he could lay his hands on.

What he laid his hands on was a fellow named Marvin Frey,
previously unknown to fame. Frey had a daughter named Sibyl,
also unknown to fame, but not, Mr. Frey said, unknown to Tom
Stark. It was simple, not a new turn to the plot, not a new line in
the script. An old home remedy. Simple. Simple and sordid.

The outraged father, accompanied by a friend, for witness and
protector no doubt, called on the Boss and stated his case. He got
out, white in the face and obviously shaken, but he had the strength
to w^alk. He walked across the long stretch of carpet from the Boss’s
door to the door to the corridor, getting inadequate support from
the friend, whose own legs seemed to have lost some of their stiffen-
ing, and went out.

Then the buzzer on my desk w^ent wild, the little red light which
meant headquarters flashed, and when I switched on the voice box,
the Boss’s voice said, “Jack, get the hell in here.” When I got the
hell in there, he succinctly outlined the case to me, and gave me
two assignments: first, get hold of Tom Stark, and second, find all
there was about Marvin Frey.

It took all day and the efforts of half of the Highway Patrol to
locate Tom Stark, who was, it developed, at a fishing lodge on
Bigger’s Bay with several cronies and some girls and a lot of wet
glasses and dry fishing tackle. It was near six o’clock before they
fetched him in. I was out in the reception room when he came in.
“Hi, Jack,” he said, “what’s eating on him now?” And he cocked
his head toward the Boss’s door.

“He’ll tell you,” I said, and watched him head toward the door,
a wonderfully set-up fellow in dirty white duck trousers, sandals,
and a pale-blue short-sleeved silky sport shirt that stuck to the
damp pectoral muscles and almost popped over the brown biceps.
His head, with a white gob cap stuck on it, was thrust forward
just a little bit, and had the slightest roll when he walked, and his
arms hung slightly crooked with the elbows a little out. Watching
the arms hanging that way, you got the impression that they were
like weapons just loosened and riding easy and ready in the scab-
bards. He didn^t knock, but walked straight into the Boss’s office.
I retreated to my own office and waited for the dust to settle. What-
ever it was, Tom was not going to stand and take it, not even from
the Boss.

A half hour later Tom came out, slamming the door so that the

S50

hea\y gold-framed paintings of the former governors hung around
the paneled walls ot the big reception room shivered like autumn
lea\'es in a blast. He stalked across the room, not even giving a
look in the direction of my open door, and went out. At first, he
had, the Boss told me later, denied everything. Then he had ad-
mitted everything, looking the Boss in the eye, with a what-the-
helFs-it-to-you expression. The Boss was fit to be tied when I saw
him a few^ minutes after Tom’s departure. He had only one small
comfort— -that from the legal point of view, Tom had been just one
of a platoon of Sibyl's friends, according to Tom himself. But,
aside from the legal point of vie%v, that fact just made the Boss
madder, Tom's being one of a platoon. It w’ould be convenient
in any discussion of the paternity of Sibyl's alleged child, but it
seemed to hurt the Boss's pride.

I had found Tom and brought him in as one of my assignments.
The second one took a little longer. Finding out about Ivlarvin
Frey. There wasn't much to find out, it appeared. He was a barber
in the only hotel in a fair-sized town, Duboisville, over in the
Fourth District. He was a sporting barber, with knife-edged creases
in his striped pants, ointment on his thinning hair, hands like in-
jSated white rubber gloves, a Racing Form in his hip pocket, the
shapeless soft nose with tiie broken veins like tiny purple vines,
and breath sweetly flavored with Sen-Sen and red-eye. He was a
widow^er, living wdth his two daughters. You don't have to find out
much about a fellow like that. You know it all already. Sure, he
has an immortal soul which is individual and precious in God's
eye, and he is that unique agglomeration of atomic energy known
as Marvin Frey, but you know all about him. You know his jokes,
you knoTv the insinuative hee-hee through his nose with which he
prefaces them, you know how the gray tongue licks luxuriously
over his lips at the conclusion, you know how he fawns and drools
over the inert mass with the face covered with steaming towels
which happens to be the local banker or the local gambling-house
proprietor or the local congressman, you know how he kids the
hotel chippies and tries to talk them out of something, you know
how he gets in debt because of his bad hunches on the horses and
bad luck with the dice, you know how he wakes up in the morning
and sits on the edge of the bed with his bare feet on the cold
floor and a taste like brass on the back of his tongue and experi-
ences his nameless despair. You know that, with the combination
of poverty, fear, and vanity, he is perfectly designed to be robbed
of his last pride and last shame and be used by MacMurfee. Or
by somebody else.

351

But it happened to be MacMurfee. This angle had not appeai'ed
in Marvin's first interview. It appeared a few days later. One of
MacMurfee's boys called on the Boss, said MacMurfee had heard
how a fellow named Frey had a daughter named Sibyl who had
something on Tom Stark, but MacMurfee had always liked foot-
ball and sure liked the ivay Tom carried the ball, and didn't w^ant
to see the boy get mixed up in anything unpleasant. Frey, the fel-
low said, was not in any frame of mind to be reasonable. He was
going to make Tom marry the daughter. (The Boss’s face must have
been something to see at that point.) But Frey lived over in Mac-
Alurfee’s district, and MacMurfee knew him a little, and maybe
IMacMurfee could put some reasonableness into Frey’s head. It
would cost something, of course, to do it that way, but there
wouldn’t be any publicity, and Tom w^ould still be a bachelor.

What would it cost? Well, some money for Sibyl. Folding money.

But this meant that MacMurfee was simply acting out of a deep
heart and generous nature.

What would it cost? Well, MacMurfee was thinking he might
run for Senator.

So that was it.

But the Boss, as Anne Stanton had told me, was figuring on going
to the Senate himself. He had it in the sack. He had the state in a
sack. Except for MacMurfee. MacMurfee and Marvin Frey. But
still, he wasn’t in any mood to dicker with MacMurfee. He didn’t
dicker, but he stalled.

There was one reason he could take the chance and stall. If
Marvin and MacMurfee had had it sewed up absolutely tight, and
could have ruined the Boss, they would have done it without fur-
ther ado. They wouldn’t have bothered to dicker. They had some
cards, all right, but it wasn’t necessarily a straight flush, and they
had to take their gamble, too. They had to wait, while the Boss
did his thinking, and hope that he wouldn’t think up anything
unpleasant in his turn.

WTiile the Boss did his thinking, I saw Lucy Stark. She wrote me
a note and asked me to come to see her. I knew what she wanted.
She wanted to talk about Tom. Obviously, she wasn’t finding out
anything from Tom himself, or at least, what she considered to be
the truth and the whole truth, and she wasn’t talking it over with
the Boss for on the matter of Tom she and the Boss had never
agreed. So she was going to ask me questions, and I was going to
sit and sweat on the red plush upholstery in the parlor of the farm-
house where she was living. But that had to be. Long back, I had
made up my mind that when Lucy Stark asked me to do some-

S52

thing I was going to do it. It was not exactly that I felt I owed
Lucy Stark a debt, or had to make restitution, or do penance. At
least, if there was a debt, it was not to Lucy Stark, and if there was
restitution to be made it was not to be made to her. If there was
a debt, it w^as, perhaps, due to me, from me. And if restitution was
to be made, it was to be made to me, by me. And as for penance,
there had been no crime for which I should do it. My only crime
was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don’t
have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance,
in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.

If you have ever been down toward the Gulf, you knew the
kind of house. White frame, but with the glitter long gone. One
story, a wide gallery across the front with spindly posts supporting
the shed over it. A tin roof, with faint streaks of rust showing red
in the channel joints. The whole thing set high on brick pillars, to
make a cool cobweb-draped cloister underneath, screened on the
front side by rank ligustrums and canna beds, for hens to con-
gregate and fluff in the dust and an old shepherd dog to lie and
pant in the hot days. It sits pretty well back from the road, in a
lawn gone sparse and rusty in the late season. On each side of an
anachronistic patch of concrete walk, which dies blankly at the gate
where the earth of the highway shoulder shows raw, there are two
round flower beds made by laying an old automobile tire on the
ground and filling it with wood earth. There are a few zinnias in
each, hairy like an animal, brilliant in the dazzling sun. At each
end of the house is a live oak, not grand ones. Beyond the house,
flanking it on each side are the chicken houses and barns, un-
painted. But the faded-white decent house itself, sitting there in the
middle of the late-summer afternoon, in the absolute quiet of that
time of day and year, with the sparse lawn and tidy flower beds
and the prideful patch of concrete walk in front, the oaks at each
side, is like nothing so much as a respectable, middle-aged woman,
in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid
shoes, the pepper-and-salt hair coiled on her head, sitting in her
rocker with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little
ease, now the day’s work is done and the menfolks are in the field
and it’s not yet time to think about supper and strain the evening
milk.

I stepped gingerly up that patch of concrete walk, as though I
were treading on dozens of e^s laid by all those white leghorns
back in the chicken run.

Lucy led me into the parlor, which was just the place I had
known it would be, the carved black-walnut furniture upholstered

353

in red plush, with a few tassels still left hanging here and there,
the Bible and the stereoscope and the neat pile of cards for the
stereoscope on the car^^ed black-walnut table, a flowered carpet,
with little rag rugs laid over the places most worn, the big walnut
and gilt frames on the 'wall enclosing the stern, malarial, Calvinistic
faces whose eyes fixed you -with little sympathy. The windows of the
room were closed, and the curtains drawn to give a shadowy,
aqueous light in which we sat silently for a minute as though at
a funeral. The palm of my hand laid down on the plush prickled
drily.

She sat there as though I hadn't come, not looking at me but
do^vn at a floral figure in the carpet. The abundant dark-brown
hair which, when I first met Lucy out at the Stark place, had been
massacred off at the neck and marcelled by the beauty operator of
Mason City, had long since grown back to its proper length. The
auburn luster was still in it, maybe, but I couldn’t see it in the
dim light of the parlor. I had, however, noticed the few touches
of gray, when I met her at the door. She sat across from me on the
red plush seat of a stiff, carved, walnut chair, with her still good
ankles crossed in front of her, and her waist, not so little now, still
straight, and her bosom full but not shapeless under the blue sum-
mer cloth. The soft soothing contours of her face weren't girlish
any more, as they had been on that first evening back in Old
Man Stark's house, for now there was a hint of weight, of the
infinitesimal do-wnward drag, in the flesh, the early curse and
certain end of those soft, soothing faces which, especially when
very young, appeal to all our natural goodness and make us think
of the sanctity of motherhood. Yes, that is the kind of face you
would put on the United States Madonna if you were going to
paint her. But you aren't, and meanwhile it is the kind of face they
try to put on advertisements of ready-mix cake flour and patented
diapers and whole-wheat bread-good, honest, wholesome, trusting,
courageous, tender, and with the glow of youth. The glow of youth
wasn't on the particular face any more, but when Lucy Stark
lifted her head to speak, I saw that the large, deep-brown eyes
hadn't changed much. Time and trouble had shaded and deepened
them some, but that was all.

She said, *lt's about Tom."

“Yes," I said.

She said, “I know something is wrong."

I nodded.

She said, “Tell me."

I inhaled the dry air and the faint closed-parlor odor of fumt

354

ture polish, which is the odor of decency and care and modest
hopes, and squirmed on my seat while the red plush prickled my
pressed-down palm like a nettle.

She said, “Jack, tell me the truth. I’ve got to know the truth,
Jack. You will tell me the truth. You’ve always been a good friend-
You were a good friend to Willie and me—back }onder— back yom
der— when— ”

Her voice trailed off.

So I told her the truth. About Mar\dn Frey’s visit.

Her hands twisted in her lap while I spoke, and then clenched
and lay still. Then she said, “There’s just one thing for him to do.”

“There might be a— a settlement— you know, a—”

But she broke in. “There’s just one right thing,” she said.

I waited.

“He’ll— he’ll marry her,” she said, and held her head up very
straight.

I squirmed a little, then said, “Well— well, you see— it looks like
—like there might have been— some others— other friends of Sibyl-
others who—”

“Oh, God,” she breathed so softly I could scarcely tell it was
more than a breath she uttered, and I saw the hands clench and
unclench on her lap again.

“And,” I went on, now I was in it, “there’s another angle to it,
too. There’s some politics mixed up, too. You see— MacMurfee
wants—”

“Oh, God,” she breathed again, and rose abruptly from the chair,
and pressed her clenched hands together in front of her bosom.
“Oh, God, politics,” she whispered, and took a distracted step or
two away from me, and said again, “Politics.” Then she swung to-
ward me, and said, out loud now, “Oh, God, in this too,”

“Yes,” I nodded, “like most things.”

She went to one of the windows, where she stood with her back
to me and the parlor and peered through a crack between the cur-
tains out into the hot, sun-dazzled world outside, where everything
happened.

After a minute she said, “Go on, tell me what you were going
to tell.”

So not even looking at her as she peered out the crack into the
world but looking at the empty chair where she had been sitting,
I told her about the MacMurfee proposition and how things were.

My voice stopped. Then there was another minute of silence.
Then, I heard her voice back over by the window, “It had to be
this way, I guess. I have tried to do right but it had to be this way.

I guess. Oh, Jack—” I heard the rustle as she turned from the win*
dow, and swung my head to^vard her, as she said— “Oh, Jack, I tried
to do right. I loved my boy and tried to raise him right. I loved
my husband and tried to do my duty. And they lo\e me. I think
they love me. After everything. I have to think that. Jack. I have
to.”

I sat there and sweated on the red plush, while the large, deep-
brown e)es fixed on me in a mixture of appeal and affirmation.

Then she said, ver) quietly now, “I have to think that. And think
that it will be all right in the end.”

“Listen,” I said, “the Boss stalled them off, hell think of some-
thing, itll be ail right.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that, I meant—” but she stopped.

But I knew what she had meant, even as her voice, lower and
steadier now, and at the same time more resigned, resumed to say,
“Yes, hell think of something. It will be all right.”

There wasn’t any use to hang round longer. I got up, rescued
my old Panama off the carved walnut table, where the Bible and
stereoscope were, walked across to Lucy, put out my hand to her,
and said, “Itll be all right,”

She looked at my hand as though she didn’t know why it was
there. Then she looked at me. “It’s just a baby,” she almost whis-
pered. “It’s just a little baby. It’s a little baby in the dark. It’s not
even born yet, and it doesn’t know about what's happened. About
money and politics and somebody wanting to be a senator. It
doesn’t know about anything— about how it came to be— about what
that girl did— or why— or why the father— why he—” She stopped,
and the large brown eyes kept looking at me with appeal and what
might have been accusation. Then she said, “Oh, Jack, it’s a little
baby, and nothing’s its fault.”

I almost burst out that it wasn’t my fault, either, but I didn’t.

Then she added, “It may be my grandbaby. It may be my boy’s
baby.”

Then, after a moment, “I would love it.”

Her hands, which had been clenched into fists and pressed to-
gether at the level of her breast, opened slowly at the words, and
reached out, supine and slightly cupped, but with the wrists still
against her own body as though expectation were humble or hope-
less.

She noticed me looking down at the hands, then quickly let them
drop.

“Good-bye,” I said, and moved toward the door.

356

“Thank you, Jack,*' she said, but didn’t follow me. Which suited
me down to the ground, for I was really on my way out.

I walked out into the dazzling world and dowm the prideful patch
of concrete and got into my car and headed back to town, where,
no doubt, I belonged.

The Boss did think up something.

First, he thought that it might be a good idea to get in touch
with Marvin Frey, directly and not through MacMurfee, to feel
out the situation there. But MacMurfee was too smart for that.
He didn’t trust Frey or the Boss, either, and Marvin had been
whisked off, nobody knew where exactly. But, as it developed later,
Marvin and Sibyl had been carried off into Arkansas, w^hich was
probably the last place they wanted to be, on a farm up in Ar-
kansas, where the only horses were mules and the brightest light
came from a patented gasoline pressure lamp on the parlor table
and there weren’t any fast cars and people went to bed to sleep
at eight-thirty and got up at dawn. Of course, they had some com-
pany along, and could play three-handed poker and rummy, for
MacMurfee had sent along one of his boys, who, I was to learn,
kept the car keys in his pants pocket by day and under his pillow
by night, and practically stood outside the door of the backhouse,
leaning on the trellis of honeysuckle, with a derby on the side of
his head, when one of them went there, just to be sure there weren't
any shenanigans like cutting across the back lot in the direction of
the railroad ten miles off. He was also the one who thumbed through
the mail first, for Marvin and Sibyl weren’t supposed to be getting
any mail. Nobody was supposed to know where they were. And we
didn’t find out. Not until a long time after.

Second, the Boss thought about Judge Irwin. If MacMurfee
would listen to sense at all, he w^ould listen to sense from Judge
Irwin. He owed Irwin a lot, and there weren’t so many legs left to
MacMurfee’s stool he could afford to lose one. So, the Boss thought,
theii was Judge Irwin.

He called me in and said, “I told you to dig on Irwin. What did
you get?”

“I got something,” I said.

“What?”

“Boss,” I said, “I’m going to give Irwin a break. If he can prove
to me it isn’t true, I won’t spill it.”

“God damn it,” he began, “I told you—”

“I’m giving Irwin a break,” I said. “I promised two people I
would do it.”

S57

“Who?’’

“Well, I promised myself, for one. The other doesn’t matter.”

“You promised yourself, huh?” He looked hard at me.

“Yeah, I did.”

“O.K.,” he said. “Do it your way. If it’ll stick, you know what I
want.” He surv^eyed me glumly, then added, “And it better stick.”

“Boss,” I said, “I’m afraid it will.”

“Afraid?” he said.

“Yeah,”

“Wio you working for? Him or me?”

“Well, I’m not framing Judge Irwin.”

He kept on studying me. “Boy,” he said then, “I’m not asking
you to frame him. I never asked you to frame anybody. Did I?”

“No.”

“I never did ask you to frame anybody. And you know why?”

“No.”

“Because it ain’t ever necessary. You don’t ever have to frame
anybody, because the truth is always sufficient.”

“You sure take a high view of human nature,” I said.

“Boy,” he said, “I went to a Presbyterian Sunday school back in
the days when they still had some theology, and that much of it
stuck. And—” he grinned suddenly— “I have found it very valuable.”

So our conversation ended, and I got into my car and headed for
Burden’s Landing.

The next morning, as soon as I had my breakfast, which I ate
alone, for the Young Executive had left for town and my mother
wouldn’t get up till pushing noon, I strolled down the beach. It
w’as a fine morning, but not as hot as usual. The beach was deserted
at that hour, except for some kids playing in the bright shallows
a quarter of a mile off, thin-iegged little kids like sandpipers. I
wandered on down past them, and as I passed they paused an
instant in their leaping and splashing and gyration to favor me
with an indifferent stare from their brown, water-slick faces. But
it was only for an instant, for I obviously belonged to that duU
and purblind race which wears shoes and trousers, and you do not
leap up and down in the bright shallows in shoes and trousers.
You do hot even walk on the sand and get sand in your shoes if
you can avoid it. But at least I was walking on the sand and getting
it liberally into my shoes. I wasn’t too old for that. I reflected on
that with satisfaction, and moved on toward the cluster of pines
and the big oak and the mimosas and myrtles, just back from the
beach, where the tennis courts were. There were some benches there

358

in the shade, and I had the unread morning paper in my hand.
After I had read the paper, I would begin to think about what
would happen later on in the day. But I wasn't even thinking about
it yet.

I found the bench near the vacant court and lighted my cigarette
and began to read. I read the front page, every word, with the
mechanical devotion of a padre working over the missal, and didn’t
even think of all the news wliich I knew and which wasn’t on the
front page. I was well into the third page, when I heard voices and
looked up to see the pair of players, a boy and girl, approaching
on the other side of the courts. After an idle glance at me, tliey
took possession of the farther court, and began to beat the little
tvhite bail back and forth, just idly to loosen up their muscles.

You could tell by the first exchange that they knew what they
were about. And you could tell that their muscles didn’t need
much loosening up. He was of medium height, perhaps a shade
under, with a deep chest and big arms and nothing extra around
the waist. His red hair had a crew cut, crinkly red hair showed on
his chest above the underwear vest he was wearing instead of a
shirt, and his skin was an even baby-pink except for the big
blotches of brown freckles on his face and shoulders. In the middle
of the freckles his face was all white-toothed grin and the glint of
blue eyes. She was a brown lively girl, short brown hair that
snapped when she pirouetted, and brown arms and shoulders above
the white halter tied over her breasts, and bro^m legs flashing above
white shoes and socks, and a little brown fiat tummy between the
w^hite shorts and the white halter. They were both pretty young.

They began the game right quick, and I watched them over my
newspaper. Maybe the red-headed fellow wasn’t trying his hardest,
but she was handing them back to him well enough and could
make him move around the court. She was even taking a game
from him now and then. She was a pretty thing to w^atch, so light
and springy and serious-faced and flashy-legged. But not as pretty
as Anne Stanton had been, I decided. I even meditated on the
superior beauty of a white skirt which could flow and whip with
the player’s motion as compared to shorts. But shorts were good.
They were good on the lively brown girl. I had to admit that.

And I had to admit, as I watched, that I had a knot in my
stomach. Because I wasn’t out there on the court. With Anne Stan-
ton. It was a terrific and fundamental injustice that I wasn’t out
there. What was that red-faced, crop-headed fellow doing there?
What was that girl doing there? I suddenly didn’t like them. I felt
like going over there and stopping the game and saying, “You

359

think }oull be here placing tennis forever, don’t you? Well, you
won’t.”

'‘Why, no,” the girl would say, “not forever.”

“Hell, no,” the fellow would say, “we’re going swimming this
afternoon, then tonight we’re—”

“You don’t get it,” I would say. “Sure, I know you’re going swim^
ming, and you’re going out somewhere tonight and you’ll stop the
car on the way home. But you think you’ll be here this 'way for-
ever.”

“Hell, no,” he would say, “I’m going back to college next week.”

“Fm going off to school,” she Tvould say, “but Thanksgiving I’ll
see Al, won’t I, Al— and you’ll take me to the big game— won’t you,
Ai?”

They wouldn’t get it worth a damn. There was no use in giving
them the benefit of my wisdom. Not even of the great big piece of
W'isdom which I had learned on my trip to California. They didn’t
know the wisdom of the Great Twitch, but they would have to
find it out for themselves, for there was no use to tell them. They
might listen politely, but they wouldn’t believe a word of it. And
■watching the brown girl dance and flash over there against the
myrtles and the brilliant sea, I wasn’t so sure for the moment that I
believed it myself.

But I did believe it, of course, for I had had my trip to Cali-
fornia.

I didn’t see out the first set. The score was five to two when I
left, but it seemed that she might make it five-three, for the crop-
headed fellow was feeding them to her, not too obviously, and grin-
ning out of the freckles when she’d whang them back.

I went to the house, changed, and took a swim. I idled out a long
way, and floated around in the bay, which is a corner of the Gulf
of Mexico, which is a corner of the great, salt, unplumbed waters
of the world, and got back in time for lunch.

My mother had lunch with me. She kept giving me a chance to
tell her why I had come down, but I just skirted round the subject
till we got to the dessert. Then I asked her if Judge Irwin was at
the Landing. I hadn’t asked that yet. I could have found out the
night before. But I hadn’t asked. I had postponed finding out.

He was at the Landing, all right.

My mother and I went out on the side gallery and had coffee
and cigarettes. After a while I went upstairs to lie down for a spell
and digest I lay up there in my old room for an hour or so. Then
I figur^ I had better get on with my work. I eased downstairs and
started out the front door.

S60

But my mother was in the living room and called to me. It was
a strange place for her to be at that time of day, but there she was.
She had waited to waylay me, I decided. I stepped inside and
leaned against the wall, waiting for her to speak.

“You’re going down to the Judge’s?” she asked.

I said, yes, I was.

She was holding up her right hand, the back to her, the fingers
spread, to inspect the polish on her red nails. Then with her brow
ruffled as though the inspection were not satisfactory, she asked,
“Oh, politics, I suppose?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Why don’t you go later on?” she asked. “He hates to be bothered
this time of day.”

“There isn’t any time, day or night, when he wouldn’t hate to
hear what I’m going to tell him.”

She looked sharply at me, her hand with the spread fingers for-
gotten in the air.

Then she said, “He’s not very well. Why do you have to bother
him? He isn’t at all well now.”

“I can’t help that,” I said, feeling the stubbornness grow inside
me.

“He’s not well.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You at least might wait till later.”

“No, I’m not waiting,” I said. I felt that I couldn’t wait. I had
to go on and get it done. The obstacle, the resistance, had confirmed
me in that. I had to know. Quick.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said, and lowered the hand which she
had held up, forgotten, in the air the time we had been talking.

“I can’t help it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t get mixed up in— in things,” she com-
plained.

“I’m not the one mixed up in this something.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll know when I’ve put it up to Irwin,” I told her, and went
out of the room, and the house, and walked up the Row toward
the Irwin place. At least, I would walk, hot as it was, and that
would give the old bugger a little extra time before I popped the
question to him. He deserved the extra few minutes, I reckoned.

The old bugger was upstairs lying down when I got there.

That was what the black boy in the white coat said. “The Jedge,
he upstairs layen on the baid, he resten,” he said, and seemed to
think that that settled something.

361

“All right/' I said, “I’ll wait till he comes down.” And without
invitation I drew open the screen door, and entered into the
shadoiv7 gracious coolness of the hall, like tlie perfect depth of
time, wliere the mirrors and the great hurricane glasses glittered
like ice, and my image was caught as noiselessly as velvet or recok
lection in all the reflecting surfaces.

“The Jedge, he~-“ the black boy began again to protest.

I walked right past him saying, “I’ll sit in the library. Till he
comes

So I walked past the e}es of -which the whites were like peeled
hard-boiled eggs and past the sad big mouth which didn’t know
what to say now and just hung open to show the pink, and walked
on back to the library, and entered into the deep, shuttered shadow
which depended from the high ceiling and the walls of books laid
close like stone and which lay on the deep-red Turkey carpet like a
great dog asleep and scarcely breathing. I sat down in one of the
big leather chairs, dropped by the chair the big manila envelope
I had brought, and lay back. I got the notion that all the books
w^re staring meaninglessly down at me like sculptured stone closed
eyes, in a gallery. I noticed, as before, that all the old calf-bound
law books there gave the room the faint odor of cheese.

After a while, there was some movement upstairs, then the tinkle
of a bell in the back of the house. I guessed that the Judge had
rung for the boy. A moment later I heard the boy's soft feet padding
in the hall, and guessed that he was headed upstairs.

In about ten minutes the Judge came down. His firm tread came
toward the library door. He paused an instant at the threshold,
a tall head above a black bowtie and white coat, as though to
adjust his eyes to the shadow, then moved toward me with his hand
out. “Hello, Jack," he was saying, in the voice I had always known,
“damned glad you came by. I didn’t know you were at the Land-
ing. Just get in?"

“Last night," I said briefly, and rose to take the hand.

He gave me a firm grasp, then waved me back into the chair.
“Damned glad you came by," he repeated, and smiled out of the
high, tired, rust-colored old hawk’s head up there in the shadow.
“How long you been in the house? Why didn’t you make that rascal
rout me out instead of letting me sleep ail afternoon? It’s a long
time since I’ve seen you. Jack."

“Yes," I agreed, “it is/’

It had been a long time. The last time had been in the middle
of the night. With the Boss. And in the silence after my remark
I knew that he was remembering, too. He was remembering, but

362

after he had said it. Then I knew that he had put the memory
away. He was denying the memory. “Well, it is a long time/' he
said as he settled himself, as though he had remembered nothing,
“but don't let it be as long next time. Aren't you ever coming to
see the old fellow? We old ones like a little attention."

He smiled, and there wasn't anything I could say into the face
of that smile.

“Damn it," he said, popping up out of his cliair without any
audible creaking of joints, "look at me forgetting hospitality. I bet
you are dry as Andy Jackson’s powder. Little early in the day per-
haps for the real thing, but a touch of gin and tonic never hurt
anybody. Not you and me, anyway. We're indestructible, aren't we,
you and me?"

He was halfway across to the bellpull before I managed to say
anything.

“No, thanks," I said.

He looked down at me, the faintest shade of disappointment on
his face. Then the smile came back, a good, honest, dog-toothed,
manly smile, and he said, "Aw, come on, and have a little one.
This is a celebration. I want to celebrate your coming to see me!"

He got in another step toward the bellpull before I said, "No,
thanks."

For a moment he stood there looking down at me again, with his
arm lifted for the pull. Then he let his arm drop and turned again
toward his own chair, with the slightest slackening visible— or I
imagined it— in his frame. "Well," he said offering something which
wasn't quite the smile, "I'm not going to drink by myself. I'll get
my stimulation out of your conversation. What's on your mind?"

"Nothing much," I said.

I looked at him over there in the shadow and saw that some-
thing was keeping the old shoulders straight and the old head up.
I wondered what it was. I wondered if what I had dug up were
true. I looked across at him, and didn't want it to be true. With
all my heart, I discovered, I didn't want it to be true. And I had
the sudden thought that I might have his drink of gin and tonic,
and talk with him and never tell him, and go back to town and
tell the Boss that I was convinced it was not true. The Boss would
have to take that. He would pitch and roar, but he would know
it was my show. Besides by that time I would have destroyed the
stuff from Miss Littlepaugh. I could do that.

But I had to know. Even as the thought of going away without
knowing came through my head, I knew that I had to know the
truth. For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it

363

and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull
you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so
steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration,
then the dizzy whirl and plunge to blackness. For there is a black-
ness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the
Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.

So I looked across at Judge Irwin, and liked him suddenly in a
way I hadn't liked him in years, his old shoulders were so straight
and the dog-toothed smile so true. But I knew I had to know.

So, as he studied me— for my face must have been something then
to invite a reading— I met his gaze.

'T said there wasn't much," I said. “But there is something."

“Out with it," he said.

“Judge,” I began, “you know who I work for."

“I know, Jack,” he said, “but let's just sit here and forget it.
I can't say I approve of Stark, but I'm not like most of our friends
down the Row. I can respect a man, and he's a man. I was almost
for him at one time. He was breaking the windowpanes out and
letting in a little fresh air. But—" he shook his head sadly, and
smiled— “I began to worry about him knocking down the house,
too. And some of his methods. So—" He didn't finish the sentence,
but gave his shoulders the slightest shrug.

“So," I finished it for him, “you threw in with MacMurfee."

“Jack," he said, “politics is always a matter of choices, and a man
doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to
make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you
know how much it cost you. There is always a price."

“Yes, but-"

“Jack, I'm not criticizing you," he said. “I trust you. Time will
show which of us is "wrong. And meanwhile. Jack, let's don't let it
come between. If I lost my temper that night, I apologize. From
my heart. It has cost me some pain.”

“You say you don't like Stark's methods," I said. “Well, I’ll tell
you something about MacMurfee's methods. Listen, here is what
MacMurfee is up to—" And I lurched and ground on like a run-
away streetcar charging downhill and the brakes busted. I told him
what MacMurfee was up to.

He sat and took it.

Then I asked him, “Is that pretty?"

“No," he said, and shook his head.

“It is not pretty," I said. “And you can stop it.”

“Me?" he demanded,

“MacMurfee will listen to you. He's got to listen to you, for you

364

are one of the few friends he's got left, and he knows the Boss's
breath is hot on his neck. If he really had anything of more than
nuisance value, he would go on and try to bust the Boss and not
haggle. But he knows he hasn't got anything. And I’ll tell you that
if it comes to a pinch the Boss will fight in the courts. This Sibyl
Frey is a homemade tart, and we can damned well prove it. We’ll
have an entire football squad in there, plus a track team, and all
the truckers who run Highway 69 past her pappy’s house. If you
talk MacMurfee into sense, there might be some chance of saving
his shirt when the time comes. But mind you, I can’t promise a
thing. Not now.”

There was nothing but shadow and silence and the faint odor
like old cheese for a spell, while what I had just said all went
through the hopper inside that handsome old head. Then he shook
the head slowly. “No,” he said.

“Look here,” I said, “there’ll be something in it for Sibyl, the
tart. We can take care of that side of it, unless she’s got ideas of
grandeur. She’ll have to sign a little statement, of course. And I
won’t conceal from you that our side will have a few affidavits from
her other boy-friends salted away just in case she ever gets gay
again. If you think Sibyl isn’t getting a square deal, I can reassure
you on that point.”

“It isn’t that,” he said.

“Judge,” I said, and caught the tone of pleading in my own
voice, “what the hell is it?”

“It’s MacMurfee’s affair. He may be making a mistake. I think
he is. But it is his affair. It is the sort of thing I am not mixing in.”

“Judge,” I begged, “you think it over. Take a little time to think
it over,”

He shook his head.

I got up. “I’ve got to run,” I said. “You think it over. I’ll be back
tomorrow and we can talk about it then. Give me your answer
then.”

He put the yellow agates on me and shook his head again. “Come
to see me tomorrow, Jack. Tomorrow and every other day. But I’m
giving you my answer now.”

“I’m asking you, Judge, as a favor to me. Wait till tomorrow to
make up your mind,”

“You talk like I didn’t know my own mind, Jack. That’s about
the only thing I’ve learned out of my three score and ten. That I
know when I know my own mind. But you come back tomorrow,
anyway. And we won’t talk politics.” He made a sudden gesture

365

as though sweeping off the top of a table with his arm. “Damn
politics anyway!” he exclaimed humorously.

I looked at him, and e\en wdth the wr), humorous expression on
his face and the arm flung out at the end of its gesture, knew that
this was It. It wasn’t the dabble of the foot in the water, or even
the steady deep pull of the undertow or the peripheral drag of the
whirlpool. It w^as the head} race and plunge of the vortex. I ought
to have known it wnuld be this way.

Looking at him, I said, almost w^hispering, “I asked you. Judge.
I near begged }ou, Judge.”

A mild question came on his face.

“I ti'ied,” I said. “I begged you.”

“What?” he demanded.

“Did you ever hear,” I asked, my voice still not much more than
a whisper, “of a man named Littlepaugh?”

“Littlepaugh?” he queried, and his brow wrinkled in the effort
of memory.

“Mortimer L. Littlepaugh,” I said, “don’t you remember?”

The flesh of the forehead drew more positively together to make
the deep vertical mark like a cranky exclamation point between the
heavy, rust-colored eyebrows. “No,” he said, and shook his head,
“I don’t remember.”

And he didn’t I was sure he didn’t. He didn’t even remember
Mortimer L. Littlepaugh.

“Well,” I questioned, “do you remember the American Electric
Power Company?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? I was their counsel for ten years.”
There wasn’t a flicker.

“Do you remember how you got the job?”

“Let me see—” he began, and I knew that he didn’t for the mo-
ment remember, that he was in truth reaching back into the past,
trying to remember. Then, straightening himself, he said, “Yes, of
course, I remember. It was through a Mr. Satterfield.”

But there had been the flicker. The barb had found meat, and
I knew it.

I waited a long minute, looking at him, and he looked straight
back at me, very straight in his chair.

“Judge,” I asked softly, “you won’t change your mind? About
MacMurfee?”

“I told you,” he said.

Then I could hear his breathing, and I wanted more than any-
thing to know what was in his head, why he was sitting there
straight and looking at me, while the barb bled into him.

S66

I stepped to the chair which I had occupied and leaned down
to pick up the maniia envelope on the floor beside it. Then I
moved to his chair; and laid the envelope in his lap.

He looked at the envelope, without touching it. Then he looked
up at me, a hard straight look out o£ the yellow agates, \rith no
question in them. Then, without saying a word, he opened the
envelope and read the papers there. The light was bad, but he did
not lean forward. He held the papers, one by one, up to his face.
He read them very deliberately. Then he laid the last, deliberately,
on his lap.

'Xittlepaugh,’' he said musingly, and ^vaited. “You know,” he
said marveling, “you know, I didn’t even remember his name. I
swear, I didn’t even remember his name.”

He waited again.

“Don’t you think it remarkable,” he asked, “that I didn’t even
remember his name?”

“Maybe so,” I said.

“You know,” he said, still marveling, “for weeks— for months
sometimes— I don’t even remember any of—” he touched the papers
lightly with his strong, swollen right forefinger— “of this.”

He waited, drawn into himself.

Then he said, “You know, sometimes— for a long time at a stretch
—it’s like it hadn’t happened. Not to me. Maybe to somebody else,
but not to me. Then I remember, and when I first remember I say,
No, it could not have happened to me.”

Then he looked up at me, straight in the eye. “But it did,” he
said.

“Yes,” I said, “it did.”

“Yes,” he nodded, “but it is difficult for me to believe,”

“It is for me, too,” I said.

“Thanks for that much. Jack,” he said, and smiled crookedly.

“I guess you know the next move,” I said.

“I guess so. Your employer is trying to put pressure on me. To
blackmail me.”

'Pressure is a prettier word,” I averred.

“I don’t care much about pretty words any more. You live with
words a long time. Then all at once you are old, and there are the
things and the words don’t matter any more.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Suit yourself,” I replied, “but you get
the idea.”

“Don’t you know— your employer ought to know, since he claims
to be a lawyer, that this stuff,” he tapped the papers again with
the forefinger, “wouldn’t stick? Not for one minute. In a court of

367

law. Why, it happened almost twenty-five years ago. And }ou
wouldn’t get any testimony, anyway. Except from this Littlepaugh
woman. W^ich would be worthless. Everybody is dead.”

“Except you. Judge,” I said.

“It wouldn’t stick in court.”

“But you don’t live in a court. You aren’t dead, and you live in
the world and people think you are a certain kind of man. You
aren’t the kind of man who could bear for them to think different,
Judge.”

“They couldn’t think it!” he burst out, leaning forward. “By
God, tiiey haven’t any right to think it. I’ve done right, I’ve done
my duty, I’ve—”

I took my gaze from his face and directed it to the papers on his
lap. He saw me do that, and looked down, too. The words stopped,
and his fingers touched the papers, tentatively as though to verify
their reality. Quite slowly, he raised his eyes back to me. “You’re
right,” he said. “I did this, too.”

“Yes,” I said, “you did.”

“Does Stark know it?”

I tried to make out what was behind that question, but I couldn’t
read him.

“No, he doesn’t,” I replied. “I told him I wouldn’t tell him till
I’d seen you. I had to be sure, you see, Judge.”

“You have a tender sensibility,” he said. “For a blackmailer.”

“We won’t start calling names. All I’ll say is that you’re trying
to protect a blackmailer.”

“No, Jack,” he said quietly, “I’m not trying to protect Mac-
Murfee. Maybe—” he hesitated— “I’m trying to protect myself.”

“You know how to do it, then. And I’ll never tell Stark.”

“Maybe you’ll never tell him, anyway.”

He said that even more quietly, and for the instant I thought he
might be ready to reach for a weapon— the desk was near him— or
ready to spring at me. He might be old but he would still be a
customer.

He must have guessed the thought, for he shook his head, smiled,
and said, “No, don’t worry. You needn’t be afraid.”

“Look here—” I began angrily.

“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said. Then, reflectively, added, “But
I could stop you.”

“By stopping MacMurfee,” I said.

“A lot easier than that.”

“How?”

“A lot easier than that,” he repeated.

368

“How?"

“I could just—” he began, “I could just say to you—I could just
tell )ou something—” He stopped, then suddenly rose to his feet,
spilling die papers off his knees. “But I won’t,” he said cheerfully,
and smiled dnectly at me.

“Won’t tell me what?”

“Forget it,” he said, still smiling, and wa\ed his hand in a gay
dismissal of the subject.

I stood there irresolutely for a moment. Things were not making
sense. He was not supposed to be standing there, brisk and confi-
dent and cheerful, with the incriminating papers at his feet. But
he was.

I stooped to pick up the papers, and he watched me from his
height.

“Judge,” I said, “I’ll be back tomorrow. You think it over, and
make up your mind tomorrow.”

“Why, it’s made up.”

“You’ll-”

“No, Jack.”

I went to the hall door. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.

“Sure, sure. You come back. But my mind is made up.”

I walked down the hall without saying good-bye. I had my hand
lifted to the front door when I heard his voice calling my name.
I turned and took a few steps toward him. He had come out into
the hall. “I just wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I did learn
something new from those interesting documents. I learned that
my old friend Governor Stanton impaired his honor to protect me.
I do not know w^hether to be more glad or sorry, at the fact. At
the knowledge of his attachment or the knowledge of the pain it
cost him. He had never told me. That was the pitch of his gener-
osity. Wasn’t it? Not ever telling me.”

I mumbled something to the effect that I supposed it -was.

“I just wanted you to know about the Governor. That his fail-
ing was a defect of his virtue. The virtue of affection for a friend.”

I didn’t mumble anything to that.

“I just wanted you to know that about the Governor,” he said.

“Ail right,” I said, and went to the front door, feeling his yellow
gaze and calm smile upon me, and out into the blaze of light.

It was still hotter than hell’s hinges as I walked up the Row to-
ward home. I debated a swim or getting into my car and heading
back to town to tell the Boss that Judge Irwin wouldn’t budge.
Then I decided that I might wait over another day. I might wait

369

on just the chance that the Judge would change his mind. But I
wouldn^t swim till later. It \v2ls too hot even to swim now. I would
take a shower when I got in and lie down till it had cooled off
enough for a swim.

I took m\ shower and lay down on my bed and w^ent to sleep.

I came out of the sleep and popped straight up in the bed. I was
wide aw^ake. The sound that had awakened me was still ringing
in my eai's. I knew that it had been a scream. Then it came again.
A bright, beautiful, silvery soprano scream.

I bounced off the bed and started for tlie door, realized that I
was buck-naked, grabbed a robe, and ran out. There was a noise
down the hall from my mother's room, a sound like moaning. The
door was open and I ran in.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing a negligee, clutch-
ing the white bedside telephone in her hand, staring at me with
wide, wild eyes, and moaning in a spaced, automatic fashion. I
went toward her. She di'opped the telephone to the floor with a
clatter, and pointed her finger at me and cried out, “You did it,
you did, you killed him!"

“Wffiat?" I demanded, “what?”

“You killed him!”

“Killed who?”

“You killed him!” She began to laugh hysterically.

I was holding her by the shoulders now, shaking her, trying to
make her stop laughing, but she kept clawing and pushing at me.
She stopped laughing an instant to gasp for breath, and in that
interval I heard the dry, clicking signal the telephone was making
to call attention to the fact it was not on its rack. Then her laugh-
ter drowned out the sound.

“Shut up, shut up!” I commanded, and she suddenly stared at
me as though just discovering my presence.

Then, not loud now but with intensity, she said, “You killed
him, you killed him.”

“Killed who?” I demanded, shaking her.

“Your father,” she said, “your father and oh! you killed him.”

That was how I found out. At the moment the finding out
simply numbed me. When a heavy-caliber slug hits you, you may
spin around but you don't feel a thing. Not at first. Anyway, I vms
busy. My mother was in bad shape. By this time there were a couple
of black faces at the door, the cook and the maid, and I was damn-
ing them to get Dr. Bland and stop gawking. Then I raked the
clicking telephone up off the floor so they could use the one down-

370

stairs, and let my mother go long enough to slam the door to keep
those all-seeing, all-knowing eyes off what was happening.

My mother was talking between her moans and laughing. She
was saying how she had loved him and how he was the only per-
son she had ever loved and how I had killed him and had killed
my own father and a lot of stuff like that. She was still cai'rying
on when Dr. Bland arrived and gave her the h\podermic. Across
her form on the bed, from whidi the moans and the mutterings
were now subsiding, he turned his gray, gray-bearded owlish face
and said, **Jack, I’m sending a nurse up here. A very trustworthy
woman. Nobody else is to come in here. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I told him, for I understood, and understood that he had
understood perfectly well what my mother's wild talking had
meant.

“You stay here till the nurse arrives,” he said, “and don’t let
anybody in. And the nurse isn’t supposed to let anybody in until
I get back to see if your mother is normal. Not anybody.”

I nodded, and followed him to the door of the room.

After he had said his good-bye, I detained him a moment. “Doc-
tor,” I asked, “what about the Judge? I didn’t get it straight from
my mother. Was it a stroke?”

“No,” he said, and inspected my face.

“Well, wfrat was it?”

“He shot himself this afternoon,” he replied, still inspecting my
face. But then he added quite matter-of-factly, “It was undoubtedly
a question of health. His health was failing. A very active man—
a sportsman— very often—” he was even more dry and detached in
his tone— “very often such a man doesn’t want to face the last years
of limited activity. Yes, I am sure that that was the reason.”

I didn’t answer.

“Good day, sir,” the doctor said, and took his eyes off me and
started down the hall.

He was almost to the head of the stairs before I called, “Doctor!”
and ran after him.

I came up to him and said, “Doctor, where did he shoot him-
self? What part of the body, I mean? Not the head?”

“Straight through tlie heart,” he said. And added, “A .38 auto-
matic. A very clean wound.”

Then he w^ent off down the stairs. I stood there and thought how
the dead man was shot through the heart, a very clean wound, and
not through the head with the muzzle of the weapon put into the
mouth to blaze into the soft membranes to scorch Aem and the top

371

of the skull exploding off like an egg to make an awful mess. I stood
there, and was greatly relieved to think of the nice clean wound.

I went to my own room, snatched up some clothes, and then w^ent
back to my mother’s room, and shut the door. I di'essed and sat by
the side of the big magnificent tester bed in w^hich the lace-filmed
form looked so small. I noticed how the bosom looked slack and the
face sunken and grayish. The mouth was somewhat open and the
breath through it heavy. I scarcely recognized the face. Certainly it
was not the face of the girl in the lettuce-green dress and with the
golden hair who had stood by the stocky, dark-suited man on the
steps of a company commissary in a lumber town in Arkansas, forty
years before, while the scream of saws filled the air and the head
like a violated nerve and the red eartli between the fields of stumps
curdled with pale green and steamed in the spring sun. It was not
the famish-cheeked, glowing face that, back in those years, had
looked up eagerly and desperately to the hawk-headed, hot-eyed
man in alleys of myrtle or in secret pine groves or in shuttered
rooms. No, it was an old face now. And I felt very sorry for it. I
reached across to take one of the unconscious hands which lay loose
on the sheet.

I held the hand and tried to imagine how things would have been
if it had not been the Scholarly Attorney but his friend who had
gone to the little lumber town in Arkansas. No, that wouldn’t have
helped much, I decided, remembering that at that time Monty
Irwin had been married to an invalid wife, the first wife, who had
been crippled by being thrown from a horse and who had lain in
bed for some years and had then died quietly and sunk from our
sight and thought at the Landing. No doubt Monty Irwin had been
held by some notion of obligation to that invalid wife: he hadn’t
been able to divorce her and marry the other woman. No doubt that
was why he had not married the famish-cheeked girl, why he
had not gone to his friend the Scholarly Attorney and told him, “I
love your wife,” or w^hy, after the husband had learned the truth, as
he must have done to make him walk out of the house and away to
all the years in the slum garrets, he had not then married her. He
still had his own wife then, to whom, because she was an invalid,
he must have felt bound with a kind of twisted honor. Then my
mother had married again. There must have been bitterness and
dire quarrels all along mixed with the stolen satisfactions and
ardors. Then the invalid had died. Why hadn’t they married then?
Perhaps my mother wouldn’t then, to punish him for his own
earlier refusals. Or perhaps their life was by this time set into a
pattern they couldn’t break. Anyway, he had married the woman

372

from Savannah, the woman who hadn’t brought him anything,
neither money nor happiness, but who had, after a certain time,
died. Why hadn’t they married then?

I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I
thought then, was that by the time we understand tlie pattern we
are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to
break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition,
like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit,
hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition
w^e have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must
make a new seif. But how can the self make a new self when the
seitness which it is, is the only substance from w^hich the ne^w self
can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.

As I say, I dismissed the question, and dismissed the answer I
had tried to give to it, and simply held the lax hand between my
own, and listened to the heavy breathing from the sunken face, and
thought how in the scream which had snatched me from sleep that
afternoon there had been the bright, beautiful, silver purity of
feeling. It had been, I decided, the true cry of the buried soul which
had managed, for one instant after all the years, to utter itself again.
Well, she had loved Monty Irwin, I supposed. I had thought that
she had never loved anybody. So now, as I held the hand, I felt not
only pity for her but something like love, too, because she had loved
somebody.

After a while the nurse came and released me from the room.
Then Mrs. Daniell, who was a neighbor of Judge Irwin, came by
to see my mother. It had been her telephone call which brought the
news to my mother. Mrs. Daniell had heard the shot in the after-
noon but had thought nothing about it until the colored boy at the
Irwin place ran out into the yard and began yelling. She had gone
back into the house with the boy, and had seen the Judge sitting in
one of the big leather chairs in his library with the pistol on his
knee, his head canted over on one shoulder, and the blood spread-
ing out over the left side of the wdiite coat. She had plenty to tell,
and she was working down the Row in a systematic fashion. She
told me her story, pried unsuccessfully into my visit there of the
afternoon and into my mother’s indisposition (she had, of course,
heard the screams on the telephone), and tlien took her leave with-
out much to add to her basic narrative at the next port of call.

The Young Executive came in about seven o’clock. He already
knew about the death of Judge Irwin, but I had to tell him about
my mother. I made it damned plain and without trimmings that

he was to stay out of her room. Then he and I went out on the side
gallery and had a silent drink together. I didn’t mind his presence
more than a shadow.

Two days later Judge Irwin was buried in the churchyard under
the ghostly, moss-garlanded oaks. Earlier, m his house, I had filed
past the co&i with everybody else and had looked dowm at the
dead face. The hawk nose seemed to be paper thin and almost trans-
parent. The usual strong color of the flesh w^as gone and on the
cheeks tliere ivas only the coy tint of the mortician’s art. But the
coarse rufous hair, thinner than ever, seemed to stand up elec-
trically and individually from the high-domed skull. The people
filed past, looked down, murmured to each other, and went to stand
at the end of the drawing room near the potted palms imported for
the occasion. Thus the fact of his death was absorbed effortlessly
into the life of the community, like a single tiny drop of stain
dropped into a glass of clear water. It would spread outward and
outward from the point of vindictive concentration, raveling and
thinning away, drawing away the central fact of the stain until noth-
ing at all was visible.

I stood then in the churchyard, while the process was being com-
pleted, and the earth, a mixture of sand and the black surface
humus, was being shoveled into the hole where Judge Irwin lay. I
thought how he had forgotten the name of Mortimer L. Little-
paugh, had forgotten that he had ever existed, but how Mortimer
had never forgotten him. Mortimer had been dead more than a score
of years but he had never forgotten Judge Irwin. Remembering the
letter in his sister’s trunk, he had worn his fleshless grin and sound-
less chuckle and ^waited. Judge Irwin had killed Mortimer L. Little-
paugh. But Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin in the end. Or had it
been Mortimer? Perhaps I had done it. That was one way of look-
ing at it. I turned that thought over and speculated upon my re-
sponsibility. It would be quite possible to say that I had none, no
more than Mortimer had. Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin because
Judge Irwin had killed him, and I had killed Judge Irwin because
Judge Irwin had created me, and looking at matters in that light
one could say that Mortimer and I were merely the twin instru-
ments of Judge Irwin’s protracted and ineluctable self-destruction.
Eor either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death,
and the death always comes by the criminaFs own hand and every
man is a suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.

They filled up the hole and rounded off a neat mound on which
they placed a carpet of artificial grass, savagely green, in the church-

374

yard where, under the dense shade of moss and boughs and under
the mat of trodden leaves, no natural grass ever sprang. Then fol-
lowing tlie decorous crowd, I left the dead man under that green
grass of the mortician’s fancy which spared all tender sensibilities
the sight of raw earth and proclaimed that nothing whatsoever had
happened and veiled, as it were, all significance of life and death.

So I left my father, and walked dowm the Row. I had by this time
grown accustomed to think of him as my father. But this meant that
I had disaccustomed myself to thinking of the man who had been
the Scholarly Attorney as my father. There was a kind of relief in
knowing that that man was not my father. I had always felt some
curse of his weakness upon me, or what I had felt to be that. He
had had a beautiful and eager young wife and another man had
taken her away from him and had fathered his child, and ail he had
done was to walk away, leaving her in possession of everything he
owned, and crawl into a hole in the slums and lie there like a
wounded animal and let his intellect bleed away into pious didvel
and his strength bleed away into weakness. And he had been good.
But his goodness had told me nothing except that I could not live
by it. My new fatJier, however, had not been good. He had
cuckolded a friend, betrayed a wife, taken a bribe, didven a man,
though unwittingly^ to death. But he had done good. He had been a
just judge. And he had carried his head high. That last afternoon
of his life he had done that. He hadn’t said, *‘Look here. Jack, you
can’t do it— you can’t— you see, you see— I am your father.”

Well, I had swapped the good, weak father for the evil, strong
one. I didn’t feel bad about it. I felt sorry for the Judge as I walked
down the Row by the sea, but as far as I myself was concerned I
didn’t feel dissatisfied with the swap. Then I thought of the other
old man leaning over the half-wit acrobat in the grubby room and
holding out the bit of chocolate to the tear-stained face, and I
thought of the child on the rug before the fire and the stocky black-
coated man leaning to him and saying, '’Here, Son, just one bite
before supper.” Then I wasn’t so sure what I felt.

So I quit trying to decide. There was no use trying to probe my
feelings about them, for I had lost both of them. Most people lose
one father, but I was peculiarly situated, I had lost two at the same
instant. I had dug up the truth and the truth always kills the father,
the good and weak one or the bad and strong one, and you are left
alone with yourself and the truth, and can never ask Dad, who
didn’t know anyway and who is deader than mackerel.

The next day, after I was back in town, I got a call from the
Landing. It was a Mr. Pettus, who, it turned out, was the Judge’s

37S

executor. According to vvhat he said, I was, except for a few minor
bequests to servants, the sole heir. I was the sole heir to the estate
which Judge Irwin had saved, years before, by his single act of dis-
honesty, the act for which I, as the blameless instrument of justice,
had put the pistol to his heart.

The whole arrangement seemed so crazy and so logical that after
I had hung up the phone I burst out laughing and could scarcely
stop. Before I stopped, as a matter of fact, I found that I was not
laughing at all but was w^eeping and was saying over and over again,
“The poor old bugger, the poor old bugger.” It was like the ice
breaking up after a long winter. And the winter had been long.

Chapter JVine

AFTER a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after
the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down
to the new condition of things and feel that ail possibility of change
has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new
equilibrium is for eternity. After the death of Judge Irwin, after I
got back to the city, I felt that way. I felt that a story was over, that
what had been begun a long time back had been played out, that
the lemon had been squeezed dry. But if anything is certain it is
that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only
a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game
that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than
nine innings. 'When the game stops it will be called on account of
darkness. But it is a long day.

The little game the Boss was playing was not over. But I had
nearly forgotten all about it. I had forgotten that the story of Judge
Irwin, which seemed so complete in itself, was only a chapter in
the longer story of the Boss, which was not over and which was itself
merely a chapter in another bigger story.

The Boss looked across the desk at me as I walked in, and said,
‘‘God damn it, so the bastard crawled out on me.”

I didn't say anything.

“I didn't tell you to scare him to death, I just told you to scare
him.”

“He wasn't scared,” I said.

“'What the hell did he do it for then?”

“I told you a long time back when the mess started he wouldn’t
scare.”

“Well, why did he do it?”

“I don't want to discuss it.”

“Well, why did he do it?”

“God damn it,” I said, “didn't I tell you I didn't want to dis-
cuss it?”

377

He looked at me with some surprise, got up from his chair and
came around tlie desk. 'I’m sorr}/’ he said, and put his heavy hand
on my shoulder.

I moved out from under the hand.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “He had been quite a pal of yours at
one time, hadn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He sat back on the desk and raised one big knee to clasp his
hands around it.

“There is still MacMurfee,” he said reflectively.

“Yes, there is MacHurfee, but if you want any blackmailing done,
get somebody else to do it.”

“Even on MacMurfee?” he asked, with a hint of jocularity, to
which I didn’t respond.

“Even on MacMurfee,” I said.

“Hey,” he demanded, “you aren’t quitting me?”

“No, I’m just quitting certain things.”

“Well, it was true, wasn’t it?”

“What?”

“What the Judge did, whatever the hell it was.”

1 couldn’t deny that. I had to say yes. So I nodded and said, “Yes,
he did it.”

“Well?” he demanded.

“I said what I said.”

He was studying me drowsily from under the shagged-down fore-
lock. “Boy,” he said then, soberly, “we been together a long time. I
hope we’ll be in it together all the way. We been in it up to the ears,
both of us, you and me, boy,”

I didn't answer.

He continued to study me. Then he said, “Don’t you worry. It’ll
all come out all right.”

“Yeah,” I said sourly, “you’ll be Senator.”

“I didn’t mean that. I could be Senator right now if that w'as all.”

“What did you mean?”

He didn’t answer for a moment, not even looking at me but down
at the hands clasped around the crooked knee. “Hell,” he said sud-
denly, “forget it.” Suddenly, he released the knee, the leg dropped,
the foot struck the floor heavily, and he lunged off the desk. “But
nobody had better forget— MacMurfee and nobody else— that I’ll do
what I’ve got to do. By God, I’ll do it if I’ve got to break their bones
with my bare hands.” And he held the hands before him with
spread fingers, crooked and tense as though to seize.

378

He sank bade against the support ot the desk then, and said, half
as though to himself, “That Frey, now. That Frey/’

Then he fell into a brooding silence, which, had Frey been able
to see it, would have made him very happy to be way off there on
the Arkansas farm with no for^v^arding address left behind.

So the story of the Boss and IMacMurfee, of which the story of
Judge Irwin had been but a part, went on, but I had no hand in it.
I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office
as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis
and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billow-
ing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun. The leaves
rattled dryly on the live oaks when a breeze sprang up in the eve-
nings, the matted jungles of sugar cane in the country beyond the
concrete w^alks and trolley lines were felled now by the heavy knife
and in the evenings the great high-wheeled carts groaned along the
rutted tracks, piled high with the fetid-sweet burden, and far off
across the flat black fields laid bare by the knife, under the saffron
sky, some nigger sang sadly about the transaction between him and
Jesus. Out at the University, on the practice field, the toe of some
long-legged, slug-footed, box-shouldered lad kept smacking the
leather, over and over, and farther away the scrimmage surged and
heaved to the sound of shouts and peremptory whistles. On Satur-
day nights under the glare of the battery of lights, the stadium
echoed to the roar of “Tom!— Toml—Toml—yea, Tom!” For Tom
Stark carried the ball, Tom Stark wheeled the end, Tom Stark
knifed the line, and it was Tom, Tom, Tom.

The sports writers said he was better than ever. Meanwhile he
was making his old man sweat. The Boss was dour as a teetotaling
Scot, and the office force walked on tiptoe and girls suddenly burst
out crying over their typewTiters after they had been in to take dic-
tation and state officials coming out of the inner room laid a hand-
kerchief to the pallid brow with one hand and with the other
groped across the long room under the painted eyes of all the gilt-
framed dead governors. Only Sadie suffered no change. She bit her
syllables off the way a seamstress snaps off the thread, and looked at
the Boss with her dark, unquenched glance, like the spirit of the
future meditating on your hopeful plans.

The only times the Boss got the black dog off his shoulder those
days were at the games. I went with him a couple of times, and
when Tom uncorked his stuff the Boss was a changed man. His eyes
would bug and gleam, and he would slap me on the back and grab
me like a bear. There might be a flicker of that left the next morn-
ing when he opened the Sunday sporting page, but it certainly

379

didn't last out the week. And Tom was not doing a thing to make
up to the old man for the trouble he had caused. They had high
words once or twice because Tom would slack off on his training
and had had a row with Billie Martin, the coach. “What the hell’s
it to you?” Tom demanded, standing there in die middle of the
hotel room, his feet apart as though he were on a swaying deck and
his head wreathed in the cigar smoke of the place. “What the hell's
it to you, or Martin either, so long as I can put ’em across? And I
can put 'em across, see. I can still put ’em across, and what the hell
else do you •want? I can put 'em across and you can big-shot around
about it. That’s what you want, isn't it?”

And with those remarks, Tom Stark went out and slammed the
door, probably leaving the Boss paralyzed with the rush of blood to
his head.

“That's what he said to me,” the Boss told me, ”by God, that's
what he said, and I ought to slapped him down.” But he was
shaken. You could see that, all right.

Meanwhile the Boss had handled the Sibyl Frey business. I had,
as I said, no part in it. What happened was, however, simple and
predictable. There had been two ways to get at MacMurfee: Judge
Irwin and Gummy Larson. The Boss had tried to scare the Judge,
and that had failed. So now he had to buy Gummy. He could buy
Gummy because Gummy was a businessman. Strictly business. He
would sell anything for the proper figure, immortal soul or mother's
sainted bones, and his old friend MacMurfee was neither. If
Gummy told MacMurfee to lay off, that he wasn't going to be Sena-
tor, MacMurfee would lay off, because without Gummy, Mac-
Murfee was nothing.

The Boss had no choice. He had to buy. He might have dealt
directly with MacMurfee, and have let MacMurfee go to the Senate,
with the intention of following up himself when the next senatorial
election rolled around. But there were two arguments against that.
First, the timing would have been bad. Now was the time for the
Boss to step out. Later on he would be just another Senator getting
on toward fifty. Now he would be a boy wonder breathing brim-
stone. He would have a future. Second, if he let MacMurfee climb
back on the gravy train, a lot of people on whose brows the cold
sweat would break now if even in the privacy of the boudoir the
mere thought of crossing the Boss should dawn on them would
figure that you could buck the Boss and get away with it. They
would begin to make friends and swap cigars with friends of Mac-
Murfee. They would even begin to get ideas of their own. But there
was a third argument, too, against doing business with MacMurfee.

380

It was, rather, not an argument; it was simpl) a fact. The fact was
that the Boss was the way he was. If MacMurfee had forced him
into a compromise, at least MacMurfee shouldn’t be the one to
profit by it. So he did business with Gummy Larson.

The figure was not cheap. It was not peanuts. It was the medical-
center contract, the general contract. It would be arranged that Lar-
son would get the contract.

But I had nothing to do with the arranging. Duffy did that, for
he had been pulling all along for such an arrangement, and I sup-
pose that he must have got some sort of private kickback or sweeten-
ing from Larson. Well, I don’t begrudge him that. He had worked
for it. He had cringed and sweated and felt the baleful speculative
stare of the Boss on him in the long silence after he had tried to
sell the idea of Gummy Larson. It wasn’t his fault that an accident
now made the deal possible and not his own conscientious efforts.
So I don’t begrudge him his sweetening.

All of this went on behind my back, or perhaps even under my
eyes, for in those da)s as fall came on I felt as though I were
gradually withdrawing from the world around me. It could go its
way and I would go mine. Or I would have gone my way if I had
known what it was. I toyed with the thought of going away, of say-
ing to the Boss, “Boss, I’m getting the hell away from here and
never coming back.” I could afford to do it, I thought. I didn’t have
to lift a finger for my morning sinker and Java. Maybe I wouldn’t
be rich-rich, but I figured I was going to be rich in a nice, genteel.
Southern way. Nobody down here ever wants to be rich-rich, for
that, of course, would be crass and vulgar. So I was going to be just
genteel rich. As soon as they wound up the Judge’s estate. (If they
ever did, for his affairs were complicated and it was going to take
some time.)

I was going to be genteel rich, for I had inherited the fruit of the
Judge’s crime, just as some day I would inherit from my mother the
fruit of the Sdiolarly Attorney's weakness, the money he had left
with her when he learned the truth and just walked away. On the
proceeds of the Judge’s old crime I would be able to go away and
lead a nice, clean, blameless life in some place where you sit under
a striped awning beside a marble-topped table and drink vermouth,
cassis and soda and look out over the wimpling, dimpling, famous
sunlit blue of the sea. But I didn’t go. True, since I had lost both
my fathers, I felt as though I could float effortlessly away like a bal-
loon when the last cord is cut. But I would have to go on the money
from Judge Irwin. And that particular money, which would have
made the trip possible, was at the same time, paradoxically enough,

381

a bond that held me here. To change the image, it was a long cable
to an anchor, and the anchor flukes clung and bit w^'ay down there
in the seaweed and ooze of a long time past. Perhaps I was a fool to
feel that way about my little inheritance. Perhaps it was no different
from any otlier inheritance anybody had. Perhaps the Emperor Ves-
pasian was right when, jingling in his jeans the money ■which had
been derived from a tax on urinals, he wittily remarked: ‘Tecunia
non olet/*

I didn’t go away, but I was out of the swim of things, and sat in
my office or out at the University library and read books and mono-
graphs on taxation, for I now had a nice clean assignment to work
on: a tax bill. I knew so little of what was going on that it wasn’t
until the arrangement was an accomplished fact that I knew any-
thing about it.

I went up to the Mansion one night with my brief case full of
notes and clrarts to have a session with the Boss. The Boss was not
alone. Back there in the library with him were Tiny Duffy, Sugar-
Boy, and, to my surprise. Gummy Larson. Sugar-Boy sat over in a
corner, hunched in a chair and holding a glass between both hands,
the way a child holds a glass. Out of the glass he would take little
finicking sips, after each sip lifting his head up the way a chicken
does when it drinks. Sugar-Boy wasn’t a drinker. He was afraid, he
said, it might make him* **n-n-n-n-ner-ner-vous.” It would have been
awful if Sugar-Boy got so nervous he couldn’t bust jelly glasses every
shot when you threw them up in the air for him or couldn’t wipe a
mule’s nose with the rear fender of the black Cadillac. Duffy, of
course, was a drinker, but he wasn’t drinking that night. He obvi^
ously was not in any mood for drinking, even if in fleeting glimpses
one caught a glimmer of triumph mixed with the acute discomfort
he was experiencing as he stood in the open space in front of the
big leather couch. The discomfort was due, in part at least, to the
fact that the Boss was, very definitely, drinking. For when the Boss
really drank, what tender inhibitions ordinarily shackled up his
tongue were absolutely removed. And now he was drinking all right*
It looked like the first fine flush of a three-day blow and the barom-
eter falling. He was cocked back on the leather couch with a pitcher
of water, a bottle, and a bowl of ice on the floor beside his crumpled
coat and empty shoes. When the Boss really got the works, he
usually took off his shoes. He was sock-feet drunk now. The bottle
was a long way down.

Mr. Larson stood back from the foot of the couch, a middle-sized,
middle-aged, compact, gray-faced, gray-suited, unimaginative-look-
ing man. He did not drink. He had once been a gambling-house

382

operator and had found that it did not pay to drink. Gummy was
strictly business and he didn’t do anytliing unless it paid.

As I entered and took in the layout, the Boss put his already red-
rimmed gaze on me, but didn't say a word until I approached the
open space in front of the couch. Then he flung out an arm to indi-
cate Tiny, who stood in the middle of that unprotected open space,
with a wan smile on his tallow. “Look!” the Boss said to me, point-
ing. “He was the one going to fix it up with Larson, and what did
I tell him? I told him, hell, no. Hell, no, I told him, I’d be damned
first. And what happened?”

I took that as rhetorical question and said nothing. I could see
that the tax bill was out for the evening, and started sidling back
the way I had come.

“And what happened?” the Boss bellowed at me.

“How do I know?” I asked, but with that cast present I had be-
gun to have a fair notion of the nature of the drama.

The Boss swung his head toward Tiny. “Tell him,” he com-
manded, “tell him, and tell him how puking smart you feel!”

Tiny didn’t manage it. All he managed was the wan smile like a
winter dawn above the expanse of expensive black tailoring and the
white-piped waistcoat and diamond pin.

“Tell him!”

Tiny licked his lips and glanced shyly as a bride at the impassive,
gray-faced Gummy, but he didn’t manage it.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” the Boss said, “Gummy Larson is going to
build my hospital and Tiny fixed it up like he has been trying to
do and everybody is happy.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Yeah, everybody is happy,” the Boss said. “Except me. Except
me,” he repeated, and struck himself heavily on the chest. “For I’m
the one said to Tiny, Hell, no, I won’t deal with Larson. For I'm
the one wouldn’t let Larson come in this room when Tiny got him
here. For I’m the one ought to driven him out of this state long
ago. And where is he now? Where is he now?”

I looked over at Gummy Larson, whose gray face didn’t show a
thing. Way back in the old days, when I had first known Gummy
and he had been a gambling-house operator, the police had beat
him up one time. Probably because he got behind in his protection
money. They had worked over his face until it looked like uncooked
hamburger. But that had healed up now. He had known it would
heal up and had taken the beating without opening his trap be-
cause it always paid to keep your trap shut. It had paid him in the
end. Eventually he was a rich contractor and not a gambling-house

383

operator. He was a rich contractor because he had finally made the
right connections in the City Hall and because he knew how to keep
his mouth shut. Now he stood there on the floor and took every-
thing the Boss was throwing at him. Because it paid. Gummy had
the instincts of a businessman, all right.

“Fll tell you where he is/' the Boss said. “Look, there he is. Right
in this room. Standing right there, and look at him. He is a beauty,
ain’t he? Know what he has just done? He has just sold out his best
pal. He has just sold out MacMurfee.”

Larson might have been standing in church, waiting for the bene-
diction, for all his face showed.

“Oh, but that isn’t anything. Not a thing. Not for Gummy."

Who didn’t twitch a muscle.

“Oh, not for Gummy. The only difference between him and
Judas Iscariot is that Gummy w^ould have got some boot with that
thirty pieces of silver. Oh, Gummy would sell out anything. He sold
out his best pal, and I— and I—” he struck himself savagely on the
chest with a hollow sound like a thump on a barrel— “and I— I had
to buy, the sons-of-bitches made me buy!"

He relapsed into silence, glowered across at Gummy, then reached
down for the bottle. He poured a lot into the glass, and sloshed in
some water. He wasn’t bothering with ice now. He was nearly down
to essentials. Before long the water would go.

Gummy, from the vast distance of sobriety and victory and the
moral certainty which comes from an accurate knowledge of exactly
to the penny what everything in the whole world is worth, surveyed
the figure on the couch, and when the pitcher had been set back
down, said, “If we’ve got our business arranged. Governor, I think
I’ll be on my way."

“Yeah," the Boss said, “yeah," and swung his sock-feet to the
floor, “yeah, it’s arranged, by God. But—" he stood up, clutching the
glass in one hand, and shook himself like a big dog, so that some of
the liquor sloshed from the glass— “listen here!" He started across to
Larson, sock-feet heavy^ on the rug, head thrust out.

Tiny Duffy wasn’t exactly in the way, but he didn’t give back
fully enough or perhaps with enough alacrity. Anyway, the Boss
nearly brushed him in passing, or perhaps did brush him. At that
instant, without even looking at his target, the Boss flung the liquid
in his glass full into Duffy’s face. And in one motion simply let the
glass fail to the floor. It bounced on the rug, not breaking.

I could see Duffy’s face at the moment of contact, the big pie face
of surprise '^vhich reminded me of the time years before when the
Boss had scared Duffy off the platform at Upton at the barbecue,

384

and Duffy had fallen over the edge. Now, after the surprise, there
was the flash of fury, then the merely humble and aggrieved expres-
sion and the placating whine, “Wffiat made you go and do that now.
Boss, what made you go and do that?'’

And the Boss, who had passed him, turned at that, looked at
Duffy, and said, *1 ought to done it long ago. I ought to done it
long ago."

Then he moved to Larson, who, unperturbed by the goings-on,
had picked up his coat and hat and stood waiting for the dust to
settle. The Boss stood directly in front of him, the bodies almost
touching. Then he seized Larson by the lapels and thrust his own
flushed face down to the gray one. "Arranged," he said, “yeah, it's
arranged, but you— you leave one window latch off, you leave one
piece of iron out of that concrete, you put in one extra teaspoon of
sand, you chip one piece of marble, and by God— by God— Fli rip
you open, I’ll—" And still clutching the lapels, he jerked his hands
apart sideways. A button from Larson’s coat, which had been but-
toned up, spun across the room and bounced on the hearth with
a little click.

"For it’s mine," the Boss said, "you hear— that’s my hospital— it’s
mine!"

Then there wasn’t any other sound, but the Boss’s breathing.

Duffy, the damp handkerchief with which he had sponged him-
self still clutched in his hand, regarded the scene, with awe and
horror on his face. Sugar-Boy wasn’t paying the slightest attention.

Meanwhile, Larson stood there, the Boss’s hands still gripping the
lapels, and didn’t blink an eye. I had to hand it to Gummy. He
didn’t quiver. He had ice water in his veins. Nothing fazed him,
not insult or anger or violence or getting his face beat into a ham-
burger. He was a true businessman. He knew the value of every-
thing.

He stood there under the heavy, flushed face, no doubt feeling
the hot, alcoholic breath rasp on his own face, and waited. Then the
Boss released his hold. He simply opened his hands in mid-air,
fingers spread, and stepped back. He turned his back and walked
away from the spot as though it were vacant. His sock-feet made no
sound, and his head swayed ever so little as he moved.

He sat on the couch and leaned forward with his elbows on his
spread knees, the forearms hanging forward, and stared into the
embers on the hearth as though he were absolutely alone.

Larson, without a word, walked to the door, opened it, and went
out, leaving it ajar. Tiny Duffy, with the peculiar impression of
lightness, the lightness of a drowned bloated body swaying slowly

385

upward on the ninth day, which a fat man can give when he tiptoes,
moved toward the door, too. Once there, with his hand on the knob,
he looked back. As his eyes rested on the unregarding Boss, the fury
flashed again into the face, and just for that instant I thought. By
Godj he's human. Then he caught my gaze on him, and looked back
at me with a kind of suffering, mute appeal which asked to be for-
given for everything, asked for my understanding and sympathy,
asked for everybody to think well of poor old Tiny Duffy, who had
done what he could according to his lights and then they threw
stuff in his face. Didn't he have his rights? Didn’t poor old Tiny
have his feelings?

Then he followed Larson off into the night. He managed to close
the door without a sound.

I looked at the Boss, who hadn’t stirred. “Glad I got here for the
last act,” I said, “but I got to toddle now.” There certainly wouldn't
be any talk about the tax bill.

“Wait,” he said.

He reached down for the bottle and took a drag out of it. He was
iown to essentials now,

“I told him,” he said, glaring up at me, “I told him, I said, if you
leave off a window latch, I said if you leave one iron out of the con-
crete, I said if you—”

“Yeah,” I said, “I heard you.”

“—if you put one extra teaspoon of sand, you do a thing, a single
thing, and I’ll rip you wide open, I’ll rip you!” He got up and came
toward me. He stood very close to me. “I’ll rip him,” he said, and
breathed heavily.

“So you said,” I agreed.

“I told him I would, and I will. Let him do one thing wrong.”

“All right”

“I'll rip him anyway. By God—” he flung his arms out wide—
“I’ll rip him anyway. Ill rip all of 'em. All of 'em who put their
dirty hands on it. They do the job and when it's over I’ll rip 'em.
Every one- I'll rip 'em and ruin ’em. By God, I will! Putting their
dirty hands on it. For they made me, they made me do it.”

“Tom Stark had something to do with it,” I said.

That stopped him, as far gone as he was. He stared at me with
a look that made me think he was about to lay hands on me. Then
he turned from me, and moved back toward the couch. But he
didn't sit down. He leaned over for the bottle, did it some direct
damage, stared at me again, and said, indistinctly, “He's just a boy.”

I didn't say anything to that. He took another try at the bottle.

“He*s just a boy,” he repeated, dully.

“All right/’ I said.

“But the others,” he burst cut, swinging his arms wide again, “the
others— they made me do it— I’ll rip ’em— I’ll ruin ’em!”

He had quite a lot to say along that line before he took his dive
into the sofa. After he got there he made a few more muffled re-
marks along the same line and about how Tom Stark was just a
boy. Then the one-sided conversation died away, and there wasn’t
anything but the heavy draw and puff of his breathing.

I stood there and looked down at him and thought about the first
time, God knows how many years before, when he got drunk in my
hotel room at Upton and passed out. He had come a long w^ay. And
it wasn’t the chubby boy face of Cousin Willie I looked dou^n into
now. Everything was changed now. It sure-God was.

Sugar-Boy, who had sat quiet all that time over in the shadow
with his short legs barely reaching the floor, got off his chair and
came over to the couch. He looked down at the Boss.

“He is out deader than a mackerel,” I said to him.

He nodded, still looking down at the burly form. The Boss w^as
lying on his back. One leg was off the couch, dragging on the floor.
Sugar-Boy leaned to pick it up and adjust it on the couch. Then he
saw the discarded coat on the floor. He picked that up and spread
it over the Boss’s sock-feet. He looked at me, and explained, almost
apologetically, “He mi-mi-mi-might catch c-c-c-cold.”

I gathered up my brief case and topcoat, and moved toward the
door. I looked back at the scene of carnage. Sugar-Boy had gone
back to his chair in the shadow. I must have had some trace of ques-
tion in my look, for he said, “I’ll s-s-s-s-set up and s-s-s-see no-no-no-
body bothers him,”

So I left them together.

As I drove down the night street on my way home, I wondered
what Adam Stanton would have to say if he ever learned about how
the hospital was going to be built. I knew what the Boss would say,
however, if the question about Adam were put up to him. He
would say, “Hell, I said I would build it, and I’m building it.
That’s the main thing, I’m building it. Let him stay in it and keep
his own little patties sterile as hell.” Which was exactly what he did
say when I asked him the question.

And as I drove down the night street, I wondered what Anne
Stanton would have to say if she had been there in that room and
had seen the Boss piled up there, out blind on the couch. I took
some sardonic pleasure in that speculation. If she had taken up with
him because he was so big and tough and knew his own mind and

387

was willing to pay the price for anything, well, she ought to see him
piled up there like a bull that’s got tangled up in the lead rope and
is down on its knees and can’t budge and can’t even lift its head
any more on account of the ring in the nose. She ought to see that.

Then I thought that maybe that was what she was waiting for.
There is nothing women love so much as the drunkard, the hellion,
the roarer, the reprobate. They love him because they-women, I
mean— are like the bees in Samson’s parable in the Bible: they like
to build their honeycomb in the carcass of a dead lion.

Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness.

Tom Stark may have been just a boy, as the Boss said, but he had
had a good deal to do with tire wa) things were going. But, then,
the Boss had had a good deal to do, I suppose, with making Tom
what Tom was. So there w^'as a circle in the proof, and the son was
merely an extension of the father, and when they glared at each
other it was like a mirror looking into a mirror. As a matter of fact
they did look alike, the same cock to the head on the shoulders, the
same forward thrust of the head, the same sudden gestures. Tom
was a trained-down, slick-faced, confident, barbered version of what
the Boss had been a long time back when I first knew him. The big
difference was this: Back in those days the Boss had been blunder-
ing and groping his unwitting way toward the discovery of himself,
of his great gift, wearing his overalls that bagged down about the
seat, or the blue serge suit with the tight, shiny pants, nursing some
blind and undefined compulsion within him like fate or a disease.
Now Tom wasn’t blundering and groping toward anything, and
certainly not toward a discovery of himself. For he knew that he was
the damnedest, hottest thing there was. Tom Stark, All American,
and there were no flies on him. And no overalls bagged down about
his snake hips and pile-driver knees. No, he would stand in his
rubber-soled saddle shoes in the middle of the floor with a boxer’s
stance, the gray-striped sport coat draped over his shoulders, the top
button of his heavy-weave white shirt unbuttoned, the red wool tie
tied in a loose hanging knot as big as your fist under his bronze-
looking throat, jerked over to one side though, and his confident
eyes would rove slowly over the joint and his slick, strong, brown
jaw would move idly over the athlete’s chewing gum. You know how
athletes chew gum. Oh, he was the hero, all right, and he wasn’t
blundering or groping. He knew what he was.

He knew he was good. So he didn’t have to bother to keep all the
rules. Not even the training rules. He could deliver anyway, he
told his father, so what the hell? But he did it once too often. He

S88

and Thad Mellon, who was a substitute tackle, and Gup Lawson,
who was a regular guard, did themselves proud one Saturday night
after the game out at a roadhouse. They might have managed very
well, if they hadn’t got into a fight with some yokels who didn’t
know or care much about football and who resented having their
girls fooled with. Gup Lawson took quite a beating from the yokels
and went to the hospital and was out of football for several weeks.
Tom and Thad didn’t get more than a few punches before the
crowd broke up the fight. But the breach of rules was dumped
rather dramatically into the lap of Coach Billie Martin. It got into
one of the papers. He suspended Tom Stark and Thad Mellon.
That definitely changed the betting odds for the Georgia game for
the following Saturday, for Georgia was good that year, and Tom
Stark was the local edge.

The Boss took it like a man. No kicking and screaming even
when Georgia wound up the half with the score seven to nothing.
As soon as the whistle blew he was on his feet. “Come on,” he said
to me, and I knew he was on his way to the field house. I trailed
him down there, and leaned against the doorjamb and watched it.
Back off on the field there was the band music now. The band
would be parading around with the sunshine (for this was the first
of the afternoon games, now that the season was cooling off) glit-
tering on the brass and on the whirling gold baton of the leader.
Then the band, way off there, began to tell Dear Old State how we
loved her, how we’d fight, fight, fight for her, how we’d die for her,
how she was the mother of heroes. Meanwhile the heroes, pretty
grimy and winded, lay around and got worked over.

The Boss didn’t say a word at first. He just walked into the place,
and looked slowly around over the relaxed forms. The atmosphere
would have reminded you of a morgue. You could have heard a
pin drop. There wasn’t a sound except once the scrape of a cleat on
the concrete when somebody surreptitiously moved his foot, once or
twice the creak of harness when somebody shifted his position.
Coach Billie Martin, standing over across the room with his hat
jammed down to his eyes, looked glum and chewed an unlit cigar.
The Boss worked his eyes over them all, one by one, while the band
made its promises and the old grads in the stands stood up in the
beautiful autumn light with their hats over their hearts and felt
high and pure.

The Boss’s eyes came to rest on Jimmy Hardwich, who was sitting
on a bench. Jimmy was a second-string end. He had been put in at
the second quarter because the regular at left end had been per-
forming like a constipated dowager. It was going to be Jimmy^s big

389

chance. The chance came. It was a pass. And he dropped it. So now
when the Boss’s eyes fixed on Jimmy, Jimmy stared sullenly back.
Then, when the Boss’s eyes lingered a moment, Jimmy burst out,
‘‘God damn it— God damn it— go on and say itl”

But the Boss didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything. He just moved
slowly over to stand in front of Jimmy. Then, very deliberately, he
reached out and laid his right hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. He didn’t
pat the shoulder. He just laid it there, the tvay some men can do to
gentle a nervous horse.

He wasn’t looking at Jimmy now, but swept his glance around
over ail the others. “Boys,” he said, “I just came down to tell you
I know you did your best.”

He stood there, with his hand still lying on Jimmy’s shoulder,
and let that sink in. Jimmy began to cry.

Then he said, “And I know you will do your best. For I know
the stuff you got in you.”

He waited again. Then he took his hand off Jimmy’s shoulder,
and turned slowly and moved toward the door. There he paused,
and again swept his glance over the room. “I want to tell you I
won’t forget you,” he said, and walked out the door,

Jimmy was really crying now.

I followed the Boss back outside, where the band was now playing
some brassy march.

When the second half opened up, tlie boys came out for blood.
They made a touchdown early in the third quarter, and kicked the
point. The Boss felt pretty good, in a grim way, about that. In the
fourth quarter Georgia drove down to the danger zone, was held,
then kicked a field goal. That was the way it ended, ten to seven.

But we still had a shot at the Conference. If we took everything
else in the season. The next Saturday Tom Stark was back out. He
was out because the Boss had put the heat on Billie Martin. That
was why, all right, for the Boss told me so himself.

“How did Martin take it?” I asked.

“He didn’t,” the Boss said. “I crammed it down his throat.”

I didn’t say anything to that, and didn’t even know I was looking
anything. But the Boss thrust his head at me and said, “Now look
here, I wasn’t going to let him throw it away. We got a chance for
the Conference, and the bastard would throw it away.”

I still didn’t say anything.

“It’s not Tom, it’s the championship, by God,” he said. “It’s not
Tom. If it weren’t anything but Tom, I wouldn’t say a word. And if
he breaks training again. I’ll pound his head on the floor. Ill beat
him with my own hands. I swear it.”

390

“He’s a pretty good-sized boy,” I remarked.

He swore again he would do it.

So the next Saturday Tom Stark was back out, and he carried the
ball, and he w^as a cross between a ballerina and a locomotive, and
the stands cheered, Yea, Tom, Tom, Tom, for he was their darling,
and the score was twenty to nothing, and State had the sights back
on the championship. There were two more games. There was an
easy one with Tech, and then the Thanksgiving pay-off.

Tech was easy. In the third quarter, when State already had a
lead, the coach sent Tom in just to give him a canter. Tom put on
a little show for the stands. It was casual and beautiful and insolent.
There was nothing to it, the way he did his stuff, it looked so easy.
But once after he had knifed through for seven yards and had been
nailed by the secondary, he didn’t get up right away.

“Just got the breath knocked out,” the Boss said.

And Tiny Duffy, w^ho was with us in the Governor’s box, said,
“Sure, but it won’t faze old Tom.”

“Hell, no,” the Boss agreed.

But Tom didn’t get up at all. They picked him up and carried
him to the field house.

“They sure knocked it out of him,” the Boss said, as though he
were commenting on the weather. Then, “Look, they’re putting in
Axton. Axton’s pretty good. Give him another season.”

“He’s good, but he ain’t Tom Stark. That Tom Stark is my boy,”
Duffy proclaimed.

“They’ll pass now, I bet,” the Boss said judicially, but all the
time he was sneaking a look at the procession making for the field
house.

“Axton for Stark,” the loud-speaker up above the stands bel-
lowed, and the cheerleader called for the stuff for Stark. They gave
Tom his cheer, and the leader and the assistant leaders cart-wheeled
and cavorted and flung up their megaphones.

The ball went back into play. It was a pass, just as tlie Boss had
predicted. Nine yards, and first down. “First down on Tech’s
twenty-four-yard line,” the loud-speaker announced. Then added,
“Tom Stark, who was stunned on the previous play, shows signs of
regaining consciousness.”

“Stunned, huh?” Tiny Duffy echoed. Then he slapped the Boss
on the shoulder (he loved to slap the Boss on the shoulder in public
to show what buddies they were), and said, “They can’t stun our old
Tom, huh?”

The Boss’s face darkened for a moment, but he said nothing.

391

“Not for long/’ Tiny asseverated. “That boy, he is too tough
for ’em.”

“He’s tough,” the Boss agreed. Then he gave his attention with
the greatest devotion to the game.

The game was dull, but the duller it got, the more devoutly the
Boss followed every play, and the more anxious he was to cheer.
State ground out the touchdowns like a butcher’s machine making
hamburger. There was about as much sporting chance in the process
as in betting on whether or not water runs downhill. But the Boss
cheered every time we made three yards. He had just cheered a pass
which had put State on the six-yard line, when a fellow appeared
in front of our box and took off his hat, and said, “Governor Stark—
Go'^’ernor Stark.”

“Yeah?” the Boss asked.

“The doc— over at the field house— he says can you come over a
minute?” ^he man said.

“Thanks,” the Boss said, “you tell him I’ll be over in a minute.
Soon as I see the boys run this one over.” And he put his attention
on the game.

“Hell,” Tiny began, “I know it ain’t nothing. Not old Tom, he—”

“Shut up,” Ae Boss commanded, “can’t you see I’m watching the
game!”

And when the touchdown had been driven over and the point
had been kicked, the Boss turned and said to me, “It’s getting on to
quitting time here. You let Sugar-Boy drive you to the oflSce and
wait for me there. I want to see you and Swinton, if you can get
him. I’ll take a cab down. Probably beat you there.” And he vaulted
over the railing to the green, and went toward the field house. But
he stopped by the bench for a moment to kid the boys. Then with
his hat jammed down over the heavy, outthrust head, he went on
toward the field house.

The rest of us in the box didn’t wait for the last whistle. We
worked out before the rush started, and headed for town. Duffy got
ofl: at the Athletic Club, where he kept his wind in condition by
blowing the froth off beer and bending over pool tables, and I went
on to the Capitol,

I could tell even before I put my key to the lock that there wasn’t
any light in the big reception room. The girls had shut up shop and
gone home for Saturday afternoon, off to their movies and bridge
games and dates and steaks on sizzling platters at Ye Olde Wagon
Wheel roadliouse or dancing at the Dream of Paris where the lights
were blue and the saxophone made a sound like the slow, sweet
regurgitation of sorghum molasses, off to all the chatter and jabber

392

and giggles and whispers and gasps, off to all the things called hav
ing a good time.

For a moment, as I stood there in the big darkened room in the
unaccustomed stillness of the place, a kind of sneer flickered along
the edge of my mind as I thought of all the particular good times
they would be having, the places they would be having the good
times in (Ye Olde "IVagon Wheel, Dream of Paris, Capitol City
Movie Palace, parked cars, darkened vestibules), the people they
would be having the good times wth (the college boy with his cock-
sureness and scarcely concealed air of being on a slumming expedi-
tion, the drug clerk with nine hundred dollars saved up in the bank
and his hope of buying into the business next year and his notion
of getting him a little woman and settling down, the middle-aged
sport with hair plastered thinly over the big skull veined like agate
and big, damp, brutally manicured hands the color of uncooked
pork fat and an odor of bay rum and peppermint chewing gum).

Then as I stood there, the thought changed. But the sneer re-
mained flickering along the edge of the mind, like a little flame
nibbling at the edge of a piece of damp paper. Only now it was for my-
self. What right had I to sneer at them, I demanded. I had had all
those good times too. If I wasn’t having one tonight it wasn’t be-
cause I had passed beyond it into a state of beatitude. Perhaps it
was something had passed out of me. Virtue by defect. Abstinence
by nausea. "^A^en they give you the cure, they put something in
your likker to make you puke, and after they have puked you
enough you begin to take a distaste to your likker. You are like
Pavlov’s dog whose saliva starts every time he hears the bell. Only
with you the reflex works so that every time you catch a whiff of
likker or even tliink of it, your stomach turns upside down. Some-
body must have slipped the stuff into my good times, for now I
just didn’t want any more good time. Not now, anyway. But I could
pinch out that sneer that flickered along the edge of my mind. I
didn’t have to be proud because a good time wouldn’t stay on my
stomach.

So I would go into my office and, after sitting there a couple of
minutes in the dusk, would flick on the light and get out the tax
figures and work on them. I thought of the figures with a sense of
cleansing and relief.

But as I thought of the figures and resumed my passage across the
big room to the door of my ofl&ce, I heard, or mought I heard, a
noise from one of the offices on the other side. I looked over there.
There wasn’t any light showing under either of the doors. Then I
heard the noise again. It was a perfectly real noise. Nobody— cen

393

tainiy nobody without a light—was supposed to be in there. So I
■went across the room, my feet noiseless on the thick carpet, and
pushed open the door.

It was Sadie Burke. She sat in the chah before her desk (it must
have been the creaking of the chair I had heard), her arms were
laid on the desk, the forearms bent together, and I knew that she
had, just that instant, raised her head from them. Not that Sadie
had been crying. But she had been sitting in the dusk, in the aban-
doned office, on Saturday evening -when everybody else was out hav-
ing a hell of a good time, with her head laid on her arms on the
desk.

*‘Hello, Sadie,” I said.

She eyed me for a moment. Her back was toward what little light
seeped in from the window, on which the Venetian blind was
closed, and so I could not make out the expression of her face, just
the gleam of the eyes. Then she demanded, ‘‘What do you want?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Well, you needn’t wait.”

I ■went across to a chair and sat down and looked at her.

“You heard what I said,” she commented.

“I heard it.”

“Well, you’ll hear it again: you needn’t wait.”

“1 find it quite restful here,” I replied, making no motion to rise.
“Because, Sadie, we’ve got so much in common. You and me.”

“I hope you don’t mean that as a compliment,” she said.

“No, just a scientific observation.”

“Well, it don’t make you any Einstein.”

“You mean because it is not true that we have a lot in common
or because it is so obviously true that it doesn’t take Einstein’s brain
to figure it out?”

“I mean I don’t give a damn,” she said sourly. And added, “And
I don’t give a damn about having you in here either.”

I stayed in the ciiair and studied her. “It’s Saturday night,” I said.
“Why aren't you out painting the town?”

“To hell with this town.” She fished a cigarette out of the desk
and lighted it The flare of the match jerked the face out of shadow.
She whipped the match flame out with a snapping motion of her
arm, then spewed the first gulp of smoke out over the full, curled-
down lower lip. That done, she looked at me, and said, “And to hell
with you.” She swept her damning gaze around the office as though
it were full of forms and faces, and spewed the gray smoke out of
her lungs and said, “And to hell with all of them. To hell with this
place.”

Her eyes came back to rest on me, and she said, ‘I’m going to get
out of here/'

“Here?" I questioned.

“This whole place," she affirmed, and swung her arm wide with
the cigarette tip glowing with the swiftness of the motion, “this
place, this town."

“Stick around and you’ll get rich," I said.

“I could have been rich a long time back," she said, “paddling in
this much. If I had wanted to."

She could have, all right. But she hadn’t. At least as far as I knew.

“Yeah—" she jabbed out the cigarette in tlie tray on the desk—
“I’m getting out of here." She lifted her eyes to mine, as though
daring me to say something.

I didn’t say anything, but I shook my head.

“You think I won’t?" she demanded.

“I think you won’t."

“I’ll show you, damn you."

“No," I said, and shook my head again, “you -won’t. You’ve got a
talent for this, just like a fish has for swimming. And you can’t ex-
pect a fish not to swim."

She started to say something, but didn’t. We sat there in the dim-
ness for a couple of minutes. “Stop staring at me," she ordered.
Then, “Didn’t I tell you to get out of here? Why don’t you get out
and go home?"

“I’m waiting for the Boss," I said matter-of-factly, “he’s—" Then
I remembered. “Didn’t you hear what happened?"

“What?"

“Tom Stark."

“Somebody ought to kick his teeth down his throat."

“Somebody did," I said.

“They ought to done it long back.”

“Well, they did a pretty good job this afternoon. The last I heard
he was unconscious. They called the Boss over to the field house.”

“How bad was it?" she asked. “Was it bad?" She leaned forward
at me.

“He was unconscious. That’s all I know. I reckon they took him
to the hospital."

“Didn’t they say how bad? Didn’t they tell the Boss?" she de-
manded, leaning forward.

“What the hell’s it to you? You said somebody ought to kick his
teeth down his throat, and now they did it you act like you loved
him.”

“Hah," she said, “that’s a laugh."

395

I looked at my watch. “The Boss is late. I reckon he must be at
the hospital with the triple threat.”

She was silent for a moment, looking do-vvm at the desk top again
and gnawing the lip. Then, ail at once, she got up, went across to
the rack, put her coat on and jerked on her hat, and went to the
door. I swung my head around to w^atch her. At the door she hesi-
tated, throwing the latch, and said, “I’m leaving, and I want to lock
up. I don’t see why you can’t sit in your own office, anyway.”

I got up and went out into the reception room. She slammed her
door, and without a word to me moved, pretty fast, across the place
and out into the corridor. I stood there and listened to the rapid,
diminishing staccato of her heels on the marble of the corridor.

When it had died away, I went into my own office and sat down
by the window and looked down at the river mist which was finger-
ing in over the roofs.

I wasn’t, however, looking out over the mist-veiled, romantic,
crepuscular city, but was bent over my nice, tidy, comforting tax
figures, under a green-shaded light, when the telephone rang. It was
Sadie. She said that she was at the University hospital, and that
Tom Stark was still unconscious. The Boss was there but she hadn’t
seen him. But she understood he had asked for me.

So Sadie had gone over there. To lurk in the antiseptic shadows.

I left the tidy, comforting tax figures and went out. I had a sand-
wich at a hamburger stand and a cup of coffee and drove to the
hospital. I found the Boss alone in a waiting room. He was looking
a little grim. I asked how Tom was, and learned that he was then in
the X-ray room and that they didn’t know much. Dr. Stanton was on
the case, and some other specialist was flying in by special plane
from Baltimore for a consultation.

Then he said, “I want you to go out and get Lucy. She ought to
be here. Out there in the country I guess she hasn’t seen the paper
yet.”

I said I would go, and started out the door.

“Jack,” he called, and I turned. “Sort of break it to her easy,” he
said. “You know-“Sort of build her up for it.”

I said I would, and left. It sounded pretty bad if Lucy had to have
all that build-up. And as I drove along the highway, against the
lights of the Saturday-night incoming traffic, I thought how much
fun it was going to be to build Lucy up for the news. And I thought
the same thing again as I walked up the anachronistic patch of con-
crete walk toward the dimly lighted white house. Then as I stood in
the parlor surrounded by the walnut and red plush and the cards

396

for the stereoscope and the malarial crayon portrait on the easel,
and built Lucy up for the news, it was definitely not fun.

But she took it. It hit her where she li\ed, but she took it. '"Oh,
God/’ she said, not loud, “oh, God.” Then, out of the stiff, whito
face, “Wait a minute. I’ll get my coat.”

So we got into the car and drove back to town. There wasn’t any
conversation. Once I heard her say again, “Oh, God,” but the re-
mark was not addressed to me. I presumed that she was praying, for
she had gone to the little Baptist college wa\ back in the red clay
where they had been long on praying, and maybe the habit had
stuck.

And it wasn’t fun, either, when I led her into the w^aiting room
where the Boss was. He turned his face heavily to her from the
midst of the floral design on the chintz-covered, overstuffed, high-
backed chair in which he sat, and looked at her as at a stranger. She
stood in the middle of the floor, not going toward him, and asked,
“How is he?”

At her question the light flared up in the Boss’s eyes, and he rose
violently from the chair. “Look here,” he said, “he’s all right— he’s
going to be all right. You understand that!”

“How is he?” she repeated.

“I told you— I told you he’s going to be all right,” he said with a
grating voice.

“You say it,” she said, “but what do the doctors say?”

The blood apoplectically flushed his face and I heard the snatch
of his breathing before he said, “You wanted it this way. You said
you did. You said you had rather see him dead at your feet. You
wanted it this way. But—” and he stepped toward her— “he’ll fool
you. He’s all right. Do you hear? He w’ill be all right.”

“God grant it,” she said quietly.

“Grant it, grant it!” he burst out. “He’s all right, right now. That
boy is tough, he can take it,”

She made no answer to that, but stood and looked at him while
the blood subsided in his face and his frame seemed to sag with the
weight of the flesh on it. Then she asked, “Can I see him?”

Before answering, the Boss stepped back to the chair and sank
into it. Then he looked at me. “Take her down to Room 305,” he
directed. He spoke dully, and apparently w’ithout interest now, as
though in a railway waiting room answering foolish questions about
the schedule for some traveler.

So I took her down to Room 305, -where the body lay like a log
under the white sheet and the breath labored through the gaping
mouth. At first, she did not approach the bed. She stood just inside

397

the door, looking across at it. I thought she was going to keel over,
and put my arm out to prop her, but she stayed on her legs. Then
she moved to the bed and reached down with a timid motion to
touch the body there. She laid her hand on the right leg, just above
the ankle, and let it rest there as though she could draw, or com-
municate, some force by the contact. Meanwhile, the nurse, who
stood on the other side of the bed, leaned down to wipe from the
brow of the patient the drops of moisture which gathered there.
Lucy Stark took a step or two up the bed, and, looking at the nurse,
reached out her hand. The nurse put the cloth into it, and Lucy
finished the job of wiping the brow and temples. Then she handed
the cloth back to the nurse. “Thank you,“ she whispered. The nurse
gave a sort of smile of professional understanding out of her plain,
good, anonymous, middle-aged face, like a light flicked on momen^
tarily in a comfortable, shabby living room.

But Lucy wasn’t looking at that face, but at the sag-jawed face
below her where the breath labored in and out. There wasn’t any
light on there. So after a while— the nurse said Dr. Stanton wouldn't
be back for some little time and she would notify us when he did
come— we went back to the room where the Boss sat with his heavy
head in the middle of the floral design.

Lucy sat in another chintz-covered chair (the waiting room was
very cozy and cheerful with potted plants on the window ledge and
chintz on the chairs and water colors on the walls in natural-wood
frames and a fireplace wdth artificial logs in it) and looked at her
lap or, now and then, across at the Boss, and I sat on the couch over
by the wall and thumbed through the picture magazines, from which
I gathered that the world outside our cozy little nook was still the
world.

About eleven-thirty Adam came in to say that the doctor from
Baltimore who was coming for the consultation had been forced
down by fog and w^ould fly in as soon as the ceiling lifted.

“Fog!'" the Boss exclaimed, and came up out of the chair. “Fog!
Telephone him— you telephone him— tell him to come on, fog or no
fog.”

“A plane can't fly in fog,” Adam said.

“Telephone him— that boy in there— that boy in there— my boy—”
The voice didn’t trail off. It simply stopped with a sound like some-
thing of great weight grinding to a stop, and the Boss stared at
Adam Stanton with resentment and a profound accusation.

“Dr. Burnham will come when it is possible,” Adam said coldly.
Then after a moment in which he met the resentment and accusa-

398

tion, he said, ‘‘Governor, I think that it would be a good thing for
you to lie down. To get some rest.”

“No,” the Boss said hoarsely, “no.”

“You can do no good by not lying down. You will only waste
your strength. You can do no good.”

“Good,” the Boss said, “good,” and clenched his hands as though
he had tried to grasp some substance which had faded at his touch
and dissolved to air.

“I would advise it,” Adam said quietly, almost softly. Then he
turned an inquiring glance upon Lucy.

She shook her head. “No, doctor,” she almost whispered. “Fll
wait. Too.”

Adam inclined his head in acceptance, and went out. I got up
and followed him.

I caught up with Adam down the hall. “What is it like?” I asked,

“Bad,” he said.

“Hoxv bad?”

“He is unconscious and paralyzed,” Adam said. “His extremities
are quite limp. The reflexes are quite gone. If you pick up his hand
it is like jelly. The X-ray—we took a skull plate— shows a fracture
and dislocation of the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae.”

“Where the hell is that?”

Adam reached out and laid a couple of fingers on the back of my
neck. “There,” he said.

“You mean he’s got a broken neck?”

“Yes.”

“I thought that killed them.”

“It usually does,” he said. “Always if the fracture is a little
higher.”

“Has he got a chance?”

“Yes.”

“To just live or to be all right?”

“To be all right. Or almost all right. Just a chance.”

“What are you going to do?”

He looked at me directly, and I saw that his own face didn’t look
much different from the way it would have looked if somebody had
kicked him in the head, too. It was white and drawn.

“It is a dfficult decision,” he said. “I must think. I don’t want to
talk about it now.”

So he turned from me, and squared his shoulders, and went off
down the hall, over the polished composition floor, which glittered
in the soft light like brown ice.

I went back to the room where Lucy Stark sat across from the

399

Boss, in the midst of the chintz and potted plants and water colors.
Now and tlien she would lift her gaze from her lap, where the
hands w^ere clasped together with the veins shotvdng blue, and would
look across the intervening distance into her husband’s face. He did
not meet her gaze, but stared into the heatless illumination of the
artificial logs on the hearth.

After one o’clock a nurse came down to the room with the mess-
age that the fog had cleared and that Dr. Burnham’s plane was on
the way again. They %vould let us know as soon as it came in. Then
she went away.

The Boss sat silent for a minute or two, then said to me, “Go
down and call up the airport. Ask what the w^eather is like here.
Tell ’em to tell Sugar-Boy I said for him to get here quick. Tell
Murphy I said I meant quick. By God! by God—” And the oath
was left suspended, directed at nothing.

I went down the corridor and down to the telephone booths on
the first floor, to give that crazy message to Sugar-Boy and Murphy,
Sugar-Boy would drive like hell anyway, and Murphy— he was the
lieutenant in charge of the motorcycle escort— knew he wasn’t out
there for fun. But I called the port, was told that the w^eather was
lifting— a wind had sprung up— and left the message for Murphy.

When I stepped out of the booth, there was Sadie. She must have
been hanging round in the lobby, probably sitting on one of the
benches back in the shadow, for I hadn’t seen her when I entered.

“Why didn’t you say boo and give me real heart failure and finish
the job?” I asked.

“How is it?” she demanded, seizing my coat sleeve.

“Bad. He broke his neck.”

“Has he got any chance?”

“Dr. Stanton said he did, but he wasn’t wreathed in smiles.”

“What are they going to do? Operate?”

“There is another big-shot doctor coming in from Johns Hopkins
for a consultation. After he gets here they will flip a nickel and find
out what to do.”

“Did he sound like there was a real chance?” Her hand was still
clutching my sleeve.

“How do I know?” I was suddenly irritated. I jerked my sleeve
out of her grasp.

“If you find out anything— you know, when the doctor comes—
will you let me know?” she asked humbly, letting her hand fall.

“Why the hell don’t you go home and quit spooking around here
in the dark? Why don’t you go home?”

400

She shook her head, still humbly.

“You wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, and now you
hang round and lose sleep. Wliy don’t you go home?”

She shook her head slowly. “I’ll wait,” she said.

“You’re a sap,” I affirmed.

“Let me know,” she said, “when you find out anything.”

I didn’t even say anything to that, but walked on away, back up-
stairs, where I rejoined the party. Things hadn’t changed in the
atmosphere of the room.

After a spell a nurse came back to say that the plane was expected
at the port in about thirty or forty minutes. Then a little later she
came back to say that there was a telephone call for me.

“Who is it?” I asked the nurse.

“It’s a lady,” she said, “but she wouldn’t give her name.”

I figured that one out, and when I got to the phone at the floor
desk I found I was right. It was Anne Stanton. She had stood it as
long as she could. She didn’t seize me by the sleeve, for she was a
few miles away in her apartment, but her voice did pretty near the
same thing. I told her what I knew, and answered her repetitious
questions. She thanked me and apologized for bothering me. She
had had to know, she said. She had been calling at my hotel all eve-
ning, thinking I would come in, then she had called me at the hos-
pital. There wasn’t anybody else she could ask. When she had just
called the hospital and had asked for news, they had been noncom-
mittal. “So you see,” she said, “so you see I had to call you.”

I said I saw, all right, and hung up the phone and went back
down the hall. In the room nothing had changed. And nothing did
change till toward four o’clock, when the Boss, who had been sunk
in the chintz chair with his gaze on the artificial logs, suddenly
lifted up his head, the way a drowsing dog does on the hearth to a
sound you can’t even hear. But the Boss hadn’t been drowsing. He
had been listening for that sound. One instant he held his head up
intently, then swung up to his feet. “There!” he exclaimed rasp*
ingly. “There!”

Then I heard it, for the first time, the far-off wail of the siren of
the motorcycle escort. The plane had got in.

In a minute a nurse came in and announced that Dr. Burnham
was with Dr. Stanton. She could not say how long before they would
give an opinion.

The Boss had not sat back down, after the first sound of the siren.
He had stood in the middle of the floor, with his head up, hearing
the siren wail and fade and wail again and die off, then waiting for
the steps in the halL He did not sit back down now. He began to

401

pace up and down. Over to the window, w^here he snatched back the
chintz curtains to look out on the blackness of the lawn and off
across the la'wn, w^here, no doubt, a solitary street light glowed in
the mist. Then back to die fireplace, wiiere he w^ould turn ivith a
grinding motion that twisted die rug under his heel. His hands were
clasped behind him, and his head, with the forelock down, hung
forw^ard sullenly and seemed to sw'ay a little from side to side.

I kept on looking at my picture magazines, but the solid tread,
nervous and yet deliberate, stirred something back in my mind. I
was irritated, as you are w^hen the memory will not rise and be
recognized. Then I knew what it w^as. It w^as the sound of a tread,
back and forth, back and forth, caged in a room in a country hotel
beyond the jerry-built wall. That was it.

He was still pacing when a hand outside w^as laid on the knob of
the door. But at that sound, the first sound of the hand on the knob,
he swung his head toward die door and froze in his tracks like a
pointer. Adam walked into the room into the clutch of that gaze.

The Boss licked his lower lip, but he controlled the question.

Adam shut the door behind him, and took a few steps forward.
‘‘Dr. Burnham has examined the patient,'' he said, “and studied the
X-ray plates. His diagnosis and my own check absolutely. You know
what that is." He paused as though expecting some reply.

But there was no reply, not even a sign, and the gaze on him did
not relinquish its clutch.

“There are two lines of action possible," he resumed. “One is con-
servative, the other radical. The conservative line would be to put
the patient in traction, in a heavy cast, and wait for some resolution
of the situation. The radical line would be to resort to surgical pro-
cedure immediately. I w^ant to emphasize that this is a difficult deci-
sion, a very technical decision. Therefore I want you to understand
the situation as fully as possible." He paused again, but there was
no sign, and the gaze did not relax.

“As you know," he began again, and now his tone carried a hint
of the lecture room, of academic precision, “the plate showed in
lateral view a fracture and dislocation of the fifth and sixth cervical
vertebrae. But the X-ray cannot show the condition of soft tissue.
Therefore we cannot know at this moment the condition of the
spinal cord itself. We can learn that only by surgical action. If upon
operating we discover that the cord is crushed, the patient will re-
main paralyzed for the rest of his life, for the cord has no regenera-
tive power. But it is possible that a displaced segment of bone is
merely pressing upon the cord. In that case we can, by performing
a laminectomy, relieve the pressure. We cannot predict the degree

402

of benefit from such procedure. We might restore some or we might
restore almost all function. Of course, we should not expect too
much. Some muscle groups might remain paralyzed. You under-
stand?’'

This time, Adam scarcely seemed to expect any response, and his
pause was only momentary. “I must emphasize one consideration.
This operation is very near the brain. It may be fatal. And the
chances of infection are greater with the operation. Dr. Bm-nham
and I have discussed the matter at length and are in agreement. I
myself take full responsibility for advising the operation. But I
want you to know that it is radical. That it is the outside chance.
It is the gambler’s chance.”

He stopped, and in the silence, the Boss’s breath rasped two or
three times, in and out. Then he said, gratingly, “Do it.”

He had taken the outside chance, the gambler’s chance. But that
was no surprise to me.

Adam was looking inquiringly at Lucy Stark, as though he
wished corroboration from her. She turned her eyes from him and
looked at her husband, who had walked over to the window to
look out over the black lawn. For a moment, she studied the
hunched shoulders, then returned to Adam Stanton. She nodded
her head slowly, while her hands worked together on her lap. Then
she whispered, “Yes— yes.”

“We shall operate immediately,” Adam said. “I had ordered ar-
rangements made. It does not have to be done immediately, but
in my judgment it is better so.”

“Do it,” the grating voice over by the window said. But the Boss
did not turn around, not even when the door closed behind Adam
Stanton.

I went back to my picture magazines, but I turned the pages over
with the greatest care as though I couldn’t afford to make a sound
in the special kind of devouring stillness there was in the room.
That stillness lasted a long time, while I kept on looking at the
pictures of girls in bathing suits and race horses and scenes of nat-
ural beauty and long files of erect, dean-faced youths in some kind
of shirt or other lifting their arms in a salute and detective stories
acted out in six photographs with the answer on the next page. But
I wasn’t paying much attention to the pictures, and they were
always alike anyway.

Then Lucy Stark got up from her chair. She walked over to the
window, where the Boss stood and stared out. She laid her hand
on his right arm. He drew away, without even looking at her. But
she took him by the forearm and drew him, and after a momentary

403

resistance he followed her. She led him back to the big chintz-
covered chair. *‘Sit down, Willie,” she said, very quietly, “sit down
and rest,”

He sank down into the chair. She turned away and went back to
her own chair.

He was looking at her, not at the artificial logs now. Finally, he
said, “Hell be all right.”

“God grant it,” she replied.

He was silent for two or three minutes, still looking at her. Then
he said, violently, “He will, he’s got to.”

“God grant it,” she said, and met his gaze until his eyes fell
away from hers.

By that time I had had enough of sitting there. I got up and went
out and down the hall to the nurse who was on the floor desk.
“Any chance of getting some sandwiches and coffee brought up here
for the Governor and his wife?” I asked.

She said she would get some brought up, and I told her just to
have them brought to her desk, that I would take them in. Then
I wandered down to the lobby again. Sadie was still there, spook-
ing in the shadows. I told her about the operation and left her
there. I hung around at the floor desk upstairs until the sandwiches
arrived, then took the tray down to the waiting room.

The grub and coffee, however, didn’t do much to change the
atmosphere there. I put a little table by Lucy with a sandwich on
a plate and a cup of coffee. She thanked me, and broke off a piece
of the sandwich and put it to her mouth two or three times, but I
could not see that she was doing it much damage. But she took
some coffee. I put some food and coffee handy to the Boss. He
looked up out of himself and said, “Thanks, Jack.” He did not
even make a pretense, however, of eating. He held the cup in his
hand for a few minutes, but I didn’t notice that he even took a
sip. He just held it.

I ate a sandwich and had a cup of coffee. I was pouring myself
a second cup, when the Boss reached to set his cup down, slosh-
ingly, on the little table beside him.

“Lucy,” he said, “Lucy!”

“Yes?” she answered.

“You know— you know what I’m going to do?’' He leaned for-
ward, not waiting for an answer. “I’m going to name the new hos-
pital for him. For Tom. I’m going to call it the Tom Stark Hospital
and Medical Center. It’ll be named for Tom, it’ll—”

She was slowly shaking her head, and his words stopped.

^‘Those things don’t matter,” she said. “Oh, Willie, don’t you

404

see? Those things don't matter. Having somebody's name cut on a
piece of stone. Getting it in the paper. All those things. Oh, Willie,
he was my baby boy, he was our baby boy, and those things don't
matter, they don’t ever matter, don't you see?”

He sank back into his chair, and the silence picked up where it
had left off. The silence was still going full blast when I got back
from taking the dishes and uneaten food down to the desk. It gave
me an excuse for getting out. It was twenty minutes to six when
I got back.

At six o'clock Adam came in. He was pretty gray and stony in the
face. The Boss got to his feet and stood there looking at Adam,
but neither he nor Lucy uttered a sound.

Then Adam said, “He will live.”

“Thank God,” Lucy breathed, but the Boss still stared into
Adam’s face.

Adam stared back. Then he said, “The cord was crushed.”

I heard a gasp from Lucy, and looked over to see her with her
head bowed on her breast.

The Boss didn’t show a sign for a moment. Then he lifted his
hands, chest-high, with the fingers spread as though to seize on
something. “Nol” he declared. “No!”

“It was crushed,” Adam said. And added, “I am sorry. Governor.”

Then he left the room.

The Boss stared at the closed door, then slowly sank back into
the chair. He kept on staring at the door, his eyes bulging and the
moisture gathering in drops on his forehead. Then he jerked up^
right and the sound wrenched out of him. It was a formless, ago*
nized sound torn raw right out of the black animal depths inside
of the bulk there in the chair. “Oh!” he said. Then, “Oh!”

Lucy Stark was looking across at him. He was still staring at the
door.

Then the sound came again: “Oh!”

She rose from her chair and went across to him. She didn’t say
anything. She simply stood by his chair and laid a hand on his
shoulder.

The sound came again, but it was the last time. He sank back,
still staring at the door, and breathed heavily. It must have been
like that for three or four minutes. Then Lucy said, “Willie.”

He looked up at her for the first time.

“Willie,” she said, “it’s time to go.”

He stood up from the chair, and I got their coats off the couch
by the wall. I helped Lucy on with hers, and then she picked up the
other one and helped him. I didn*t interfere.

405

They started for the door. He had drawn himself erect now and
looked straight ahead, but her hand w^as still on his arm, and if you
had seen them you would have got the impression that she was
expertly and tactfully guiding a blind man. I opened tire door for
them, and then went on ahead to tell Sugar-Boy to get the car
ready.

I %vas there when the Boss got into the car and she got in after
him. That surprised me a little, but it didn’t hurt my feelings if
Sugar-Boy drove her home. Despite the coffee, I was ready to drop.

I went back inside and up to Adam’s office. He w^as just about
ready to pull out. ‘‘What is the story?” I asked.

“"^Vhat I said,” he said. “The cord is crushed. That means
paralysis. The prognosis is that for a time the limbs will be abso-
lutely limp. Then the muscle tone will come back. But he will
never use arms or legs. The bodily functions will continue but
without control. He’ll be like a baby. And the skin will be in-
clined to break down. He will get infections easily. The respiratory
control wall be impaired, too. Pneumonia will be likely. That’s
what usually knocks off cases like this sooner or later.”

“It sounds to me the sooner the better,” I said, and thought of
Lucy Stark.

“Maybe so,” he said, tiredly. He was sagging now, all right. He
slipped on his coat and picked up his bag. “Can I drop you some-
where?” he asked.

“Thanks, I’m in my car,” I said. Then my eyes fell on the tele-
phone on his desk. “But I’ll make a call, if I may,” I said. “I’ll pull
the door to.”

“All right,” he said, and went to the door. “Good night,” he
added, and went out.

I dialed outside, and got Anne’s number, and told her the news.
She said it was horrible. She kept saying that into the telephone—
“It is horrible”— in a low bemused voice, three or four times. Then
she thanked me and hung up.

I left the office. I had one more errand to do. I went down to
the lobby. Sadie was still there. So I told her. She said it was pretty
tough. I agreed.

“It will be tough on the Boss,” she said.

“It will be tough as hell on Lucy,” I said, “for she is the one who
will have to fix the baby. Don’t forget that while you’re giving out
the free samples of sympathy.”

She must have been pretty tired or something for that didn’t
make her mad. So I asked her if I could take her into town. She
had her car, too, she said.

406

“Well, I am going home and sleep forever,’* I said, and left her
in the lobby.

By the time I got out to my car, tlie sky -was curdling blue ^vith
dawn.

The accident occurred on Saturday afternoon. The operation was
performed just before dawn on Sunday. The big pay-off was on
Monday. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving.

That day, there was a gradual piling up of events, then the rush
to the conclusion, as when a great weight that has been grinding
and slipping suddenly breaks the last mooring and takes the plunge.
As I experienced that day, there was at first an impression of the
logic of the events, caught flickeringly at moments, but as they
massed to the conclusion I was able to grasp, at the time, only the
slightest hints as to the pattern that was taking shape. This lack
of logic, the sense of people and events driven by impulses "which
1 was not able to define, gave the whole occasion the sense of a
dreamlike unreality. It was only after the conclusion, after every-
thing was over, that the sense of reality returned, long after, in
fact, when I had been able to gather the pieces of the puzzle up
and put them together to see the pattern. This is not remarkable,
for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but
of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We
seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which
is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in
themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm:
that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our
own identity is dependent upon this principle.

Monday morning I got to the office early. I had slept all day
Sunday, getting up only in time for a bite of dinner and then some
silly movie, and being back in bed by ten-thirty. I came into the
office with that sense you get after a lot of sleep of being spiritually
pure,

I went back to the Boss’s office. He hadn’t come in. But while I
was there one of the girls came in carrying a big tray piled up with
telegrams. "‘They are all about his boy getting hurt/’ she said, ‘‘and
they keep coming in/'

“Theyll be coming in all day," I said.

That would be true, all right. Every pinfeather politician, county-
courthouse janitor, and ambitious lickspittle in the state who
hadn’t seen the story in the Sunday paper would see it in this
morning’s paper and get off his telegram. Getting that telegram off
would be like praying. You couldn’t tell that praying would do any

407

good, but it certainly never diJ anybody any harm. Those telegi'ams
were part o£ the system. Like presents for the wedding of a poli-
tician's daughter or flowers for a cop's funeral. And it was part of
the system, too, for the flowers, now that we are on the subject, to
come from Antonio Giusto's flower store. A girl in the flower store
kept a record in a special file of all the orders that came in for a
cop’s funeral, and then Tony just ran tlirough the file after the
funeral and checked the names by his master list of perennially be-
reaved friends and if your name w^as on the master list it had sure-
God better be in the file for Murphy’s funeral, and I don't mean
any bunch of sweet peas, either. Tony was a good friend of Tiny
Duffy,

It was Tiny Duffy who came into the office just as the girl
flounced out with a cute little twitch of her skirt. He mooned in
with a face full of professional sympathy and mortician's gloom,
but as soon as he took in the fact that the Boss was not present he
relaxed a little, showed his teeth, and said, “How's tricks?”

I said tricks was O.K.

“You seen the Boss?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Gee,” he said, and the sympathy and gloom appeared magically
on his face, “it is sure tough. It is what I always calls tragic. A kid
like that. A good clean square-shooting kid like that. It is tragic,
and no mistake.”

“You needn't practice on me,” I said.

“It will be tough on the Boss,” he said, and shook his head.

“Just save your fire till he gets here.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“I tried to get hold of him yesterday,” Tiny said, “but he wasn’t
at the Mansion. They said they didn't know where he was, he
hadn't been home. He was out to the hospital a while, but I missed
him there. He wasn’t in a hotel, either.”

“You seem to have been thorough,” I said.

“Yeah,” Tiny said, “I wanted to tell him how us boys all felt.”

Just then Calvin Sperling, who was Commissioner of Agriculture,
came in with a couple of other fellows. They were wearing crepe
on their faces, too, till they saw the Boss was not in. Then they
eased off and began to snap their bubble gum. “Maybe he won't
be coming,” Sperling suggested.

“He'll come,” Tiny pronounced. “It won't faze him. The Boss
is tough.”

A couple more of the fellows came by, and then Morrisey, who

408

had followed Hugh Miller a long time back as Attorney General,
after Miller’s resignation. The cigar smoke began to get thick.

Once Sadie stopped at the door, laid one hand on the jamb, and
surveyed the scene.

“Hi, Sadie,” one of the boys said.

She did not respond. She continued her survey for a moment
longer, then said, “Jesus Christ,” and moved on. I heard the door
of her own office shut.

I drifted over to the window back of the Boss’s desk and looked
out over the grounds. It had rained during the night and now in
the weak sunlight the grass and the leaves of the live oaks, even the
trailing moss, had a faint sheen, and the damp concrete of the
curving drives and walks gave off an almost imperceptible, glim-
mering reflection. The wffiole world, the bare boles of the other
trees, which had lost their leaves now, the roofs of the houses, even
the sky itself, had a pale, washed, relieved look, like the look on
the face of a person who has been sick a long time and now feels
better and thinks maybe he is going to get well.

That wasn’t exactly the look on the Boss’s face when he came in,
but it gives some idea of what that look was. He wasn’t really pale,
but he was paler than usual, and the flesh seemed to hang a little
loose at the jawbone. There were a couple of razor nicks along
the bone. Under his eyes were gray circles, as though the flesh had
been bruised but was just about well now. But the eyes were clear.

He had come across the reception room without making any
noise on the thick carpet, and for an instant he stood in the door-
way of the office before anybody noticed his arrival. The chatter
didn’t die; it was frozen in mid-syllable. Then there was a kind of
noiseless scurry and fumble to adjust the funeral faces which had
been laid aside. Then, with the faces in place and only a little
askew, they crowded around the Boss and shook his hand. They
told him they wanted to tell him how they felt. “You know how
us boys all feel. Boss,” they said. He said, yes, he knew, very quiedy.
He said, yes, yes, and thank you.

Then he moved toward the desk, the boys falling away from him
like water from the prow of a ship when it is first warped out from
the pier and the screw makes the first revolutions. He stood before
the desk, handling the telegrams, looking at them, letting them
drop.

“Boss,” somebody said, “Boss—those telegrams— that shows you
now— that shows you how folks feel about you.”

He said nothing.

Just then the girl came in with another batch of telegrams* She

409

set the tray on the desk in front of him. He fixed her with his
glance. Then he laid his hand on the pile of yellow paper and
gave it a slight shove and said, in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, “Get
this muck out of here.*'

The girl got the muck out of there.

The bloom had gone from the occasion. The boys began to drift
out of the oflSce and off to the swivel chairs which had not been
warmed that morning. As Tiny tvas leaving, the Boss said, “Tiny,
wait a minute. I want to talk to you."

Tiny came back. I was heading out, too, but the Boss called me.
“I want you to be in on this," he said. So I sank into one of the
chairs over by the wall. Tiny disposed himself in a big green leather
chair to one side of the desk, crossed his knees, to the great strain
of his hams and of the fabric which covered them, inserted a ciga-
rette in his long holder, lighted it, and waited.

The Boss was in no hurry. He brooded a full minute before he
lifted his eyes to Tiny Duffy. But then he came in fast. “There
won't be any contract with Larson,*' he said.

IVhen breath came back, Tiny managed, “Boss— Boss— you can't.
Boss."

“Yes, I can," the Boss said, without raising his voice.

“You can't. Boss. It's all fixed up. Boss."

“It isn't too late to unfix it," tlie Boss said. “It isn't too late."

“Boss— Boss— " the word was almost a wail, and the cigarette ash
was falling down the starched white front of the Duffy shirt, “you
can’t break your word to old Larson. He's a good guy and you
can’t. You’re a square-shooter, Boss.”

“I can break my word to Larson,” the Boss said.

“You can't— you can’t change your mind, Boss. Not now. You
can’t change it now.”

The Boss rose very abruptly from his chair at the desk. He fixed
his eyes on Tiny and said, “I can change a hell of a lot of things."

In the ensuing silence, the Boss came round the desk. “That's
all," he said, in a voice not much more than a husky whisper. “And
you can tell Larson to do his damnedest."

Tiny got to his feet. He opened his mouth several times, wet his
lips, and seemed about to speak, but each time the now gray face
closed back up over the expensive bridgework.

The Boss went up to him. “You tell Larson,” he said. “Larson is
your pal, and you tell him." He punched Tiny’s front with a stiff
forefinger. “Yeah," he said, “he is your pal, and when you tell him
you can put your hand on his shoulder." Then the Boss grinned

410

I had not expected a grin. But it was a wintry and uncomforting
grin. It put the seal on everything that had been said.

Tiny made the door, and was gone. He didn't bother to close it,
but kept on going through without a pause, dwindling away over
the long green carpet. Then he had disappeared.

But the Boss was not w^atching his departure. He was staring
moodily down at the bare top of his desk. After a moment he said,
“Shut the door.” I got up and shut it.

I did not sit back down, but stood in the open space between the
desk and door, waiting for him to say whatever it was he %vas going
to say. Whatever it was, he didn’t say it. He merely looked up at me
with a look that was innocent and questioning, and asked, “Well?”

I do not know what it w’’as he wanted me to say or what he ex-
pected me to say. Since that time I have thought a good deal about
that. That was the time for me to say whatever it was I was ever
going to have to say to Willie Stark, who had been Cousin Willie
from the country and who was now the Boss. But I did not say it.
I shrugged my shoulders, and said, ‘‘Well, it doesn’t matter if you
kick Tiny around some more. He is built for it. But Larson is a
different kind of cooky.”

He continued to look at me and seemed about to say something,
but the question faded off his face. Then he said, “You got to start
somewhere.”

“Start what?”

He studied me a moment before he said, “Skip it.”

I went on back to my own ofl&ce. That was how that day started.
I got to work on a last review of the subsidiary figures for the tax
bill. Swinton, who was handling the thing through the Senate, had
wanted them Saturday, but I had been running behind on my
homework. I had had that date to meet Swinton and the Boss Sat-
urday evening, but things had not fallen out that way. Later in
the morning I ran into a kink. I went out into the big room and
started for the Boss’s door. The girl out there said that he had gone
across to Sadie Burke’s office. The door there was closed. I hung
around a few minutes in the big room, waiting for the Boss to come
out, but the door stayed closed. Once I could hear a voice raised
beyond the door, but then it dropped.

The ringing of my own telephone bell took me back into my
office. It was Swinton saying what the hell, why didn’t I get the
figures down to him. So I got my papers together and went down
to see Swinton and give him the stuff. I was with him about forty
minutes. When I came back up to the office, the Boss was gone.

411

^He’s gone to the hospital,” the girl said, “He’ll be back this after-
noon.”

I looked over toward Sadie’s door, thinking maybe she could
help me and Swinton. The girl caught my glance. “Miss Burke,”
she said, “she’s gone, too.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” the girl replied, “but I can tell you ihis, Mr.
Burden, wherever it is she sure must already be there the way she
tore out of here,” Then she smiled with that knowing snotty
little secret way the hired help always uses to make you think they
know more than they are telling, and reached up a nice rounded
little red-nailed white hand to tuck in a stray back lock of really
beautiful corn-colored hair. Having tucked in the lock, with a mo-
tion which raised her breast for Mr. Burden’s inspection, she added,
“And wherever it is she’s gone they probably won’t like her getting
there, to judge from the look on her face when she left.” Then she
smiled sweetly to show hoxv happy any place would be to have her
arrive there.

I went back into my oflSce and gave some letters until lunch.
I had a sandwich down in the basement cafeteria of the Capitol,
where eating was like eating in a jolly, sanitary, well-run, marble-
glistening morgue. I ran into Swinton, jawed some with him, and
went, at his suggestion, up to the Senate when it reconvened after
lunch. About four o’clock a page came up to me and handed me
a slip of paper. It was a message from upstairs. It read: “Miss
Stanton telephones to ask you to come right away to her apart-
ment. It is urgent.”

I crumpled up the slip, threw it down, and headed up to my
office for my coat and hat. I told them in the office to notify Miss
Stanton I was on my way. When I got outdoors I discovered that it
had begun to rain. The clean, pale sunlight of the morning was
gone now.

Anne answered my knock so quickly that I figured she must have
been standing by the door. But when the door flung open, I might
not have recognized, at the first glance, the face I saw there unless
I had known it to be Anne Stanton’s. It was white and desperate
and ravaged, and past the tears which you could know had been
shed. And somehow you could know what kind of tears they had
been: tardy, sparse and painful, quickly suppressed.

She clutched my arm with both hands, as though to support
herself. “Jack,” she exclaimed, “Jack!”

“What the hell?” I asked, and shoved the door shut behind met

412

“YouVe got to find him-youVe got to find him-find him and
tell him—” She was shaking as if with a chill.

'Tind who?”

“—tell him how it was— oh, it wasn’t that way— not what they
said—”

“For Christ’s sake, what who said?”

“-they said it was because of me-because of what I did— be-
cause—”

“Who said?”

“-oh, you’ve got to find him, Jack-youVe got to find him and
tell him and bring him to me and—”

I grabbed her, hard, with a hand on each shoulder, and shook
her. “Look herel” I said. “You come out of this. Just stop jabber-
ing a minute and come out of this.”

She stopped talking and stood between my hands, in my clutch,
and looked up at me with her white face and shivered. Her breath-
ing was shallow, quick, and dry.

After a minute, I said, “Now tell me who you want me to find.”

“Adam,” she said. “It’s Adam.”

“Now why do I find him? What’s happened?”

“He came here and said it was all because of me. Of what I had
done.”

“What was because of what you had done?”

“He was made Director because of me. That’s what he said. Be-
cause of what I had done. That’s what he said. And he said— oh.
Jack, he said it—”

“Said what?”

“He said he wouldn’t be paid pimp to his sister’s whore— he said
that— he said that, Jack— to me, Jack— and I tried to tell him— tell
him how it was— and he pushed me and I fell down on the floor
and he ran out- he ran out and you’ve got to find him. Jack—
you’ve got to and—”

And she was off again on the jabber. I gave her a good shaking.
“Stop it,” I commanded. “Stop it or I’ll shake your teeth out.”

When she had quieted down again and was hanging there be-
tween my hands, I said, “Now start slowly from the start and tell
me what happened.” I led her over to a chair and pushed her down
into it. “Now tell me,” I said, “but take it easy.”

She looked up at me for a moment as though she were afraid to
begin.

“Tell me,” I said.

“He came up here,” she began. “It was about three o’clock. As
soon as he came in the door I knew something terrible had hap-

4iS

pened—something terrible had already happened to me today
but I knew this was another terrible thing—and he grabbed me by
the arm and stared in my face and didn’t say a word. I guess I kept
asking him what was the matter, and he held my arm tighter and
tighter.”

She pushed the sleeve up and showed the bruise marks halfway
down the left forearm.

kept asking him what was the matter, and all at once he said,
‘Matter, matter, you know what's the matter.' Then he said how
there had been a telephone call to him, how somebody— a man—
that was all he said— had called and told him— told him about me—
about me and—”

She didn’t seem to be able to go on.

“About you and Governor Stark,” I completed it for her.

She nodded.

“It was awful,” she whispered, not at me, but raptly, to herself.
And repeated, “It was awful.”

“Stop that and go ahead,” I ordered, and shook her.

She came up out of it, looked at me, and said, “He told him
about me and then how that was the only reason he was ever made
Director and how now the Governor was going to dismiss him as
Director— because he had paralyzed his son with a bad operation—
and how he was going to get rid of me— throw me out— that was
what that man said on the telephone, throw me out— because of
what Adam did to his son— and Adam heard him and ran right over
here because he believed it— he believed it about me—”

“Weil,” I demanded savagely, “the part about you is true, isn’t
it?’^

“He ought to have asked me,” she said, and made a distracted
motion with her hands, “he ought to have asked me before he
believed it.”

“He’s not a half-wit,” I said, “and it was there ready to be be-
lieved. You’re damned lucky he didn’t guess something long back,
for if—”

She seized me by the arm and her fingers dug in. “Hush, hushl”
she said, “you mustn’t say it— for nothing was that way— and not
the way Adam said— oh, he said terrible things— oh, he called me
terrible things— he said if everything else was filthy a man didn’t
have to be— oh, I tried to tell him how things were— how they
weren’t like he said— but he pushed me so hard I fell down and he
said how he wouldn’t be pimp to his sister’s whore and nobody
would ever say that about him— and then he ran out the door and

414

youVe got to find him. Find him and tell him. Jack. Tell turn,
Jack.”

“Tell him what?”

“Tell him it wasn’t like he said. You’ve got to tell him that. You
know why I did everything I did, you know what happened. Oh,
Jack—” and she grabbed my sleeve and hung on, “it wasn’t like
that. It wasn’t horrible like that. I tried not to be horrible. Was I,
Jack? Was I? Tell me, Jack!”

I looked dowm at her. “No,” I said, “you weren’t horrible.”

“But it has happened to me. It has all happened to me. And he's
gone.”

“I’ll find him,” I said, and detached myself from her, ready to go.

“It won’t do any good.”

“He’ll listen to sense,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t mean Adam. I mean—”

“Stark?”

She nodded. Then said, “Yes. I went to the place— the place out
of town we used to meet in. He called me early this afternoon.
I went there and he told me. He is going back to his wife.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

Then I pulled myself together, and headed for the door. “Fll
get Adam,” I said.

“Get him,” she said, “get him. For he’s all I’ve got now.”

As I stepped out the door of the apartment house into the rain,
I reflected that she had Jackie Burden, too. At least, as an errand
boy. But I made the reflection without bitterness and quite im-
personally.

Finding somebody in a city if you can’t call in the cops is quite
an undertaking. I had tried it often enough back when I was a
reporter, and it takes luck and time. But one rule is always to try
the obvious first. So I went to Adam’s apartment. When I saw his
car sitting out front I figured I had played into the blue ones.
I parked my own car, noticed that the driver’s door of his car was
open and might get swiped off by a passing truck and was certainly
letting the seat get wet, slammed it shut as I passed, and went on
into the apartment house.

I knocked vigorously on the door. There was no answer. But that
didn’t mean anything. Even if Adam was there, he might not be
willing, under the circumstances, to answer his door. So I tried the
knob. The door was locked. I went down to the basement and dug
out the Negro janitor and told him some cock-and-bull story about
having left some stuff up there in Adam’s place. He had seen me
around with Adam a lot, and so he let me in. I prowled through

415

the place, but no Adam. Then I spied his telephone. I called his
office, tiien the hospital, then die medical-school office, then the
exchange where the doctors left numbers when they weren't at their
usual haunts. It was no go. Nobody knew anything about x\dam.
Or rather, each one had a pretty good idea ivhere he was, but the
idea w^as never any good. That left ail the town '^vide open.

I went back down into the street. The fact that the car was there
w^as funny. He had abandoned it. WTiere in the hell did a man go
off in the rain, on foot, this time of day? Or night, rather?— for it
was dusk now.

I thought of the bars. For it is a tradition that a man, when he
has received a great shock, heads for a bar, puts his foot on the
rail, orders five straight whiskies in a row, downs them one after
another while he stares with uncomprehending eyes at the white,
tortured face in the mirror opposite him, and then engages the
bartender in a sardonic conversation about Life. But I couldn’t
see Adam Stanton playing tliat game. But I went to the bars, any-
way.

That is, I went to a lot of them. A lifetime isn’t long enough to
go to all the bars in our city. I began with Slade’s place, had no
luck, asked Slade to try to hang on to Dr. Stanton if he came in,
and then moved through the other establishments of chromium,
glass bricks, morros, colored lights, comfy Old English worm-eaten
oak, sporting prints, comic frescoes, or three-piece orchestras.
Around seven-thirty I called up Adam’s office and then the hos-
pital again. He wasn’t at either place. When they told me that at
the hospital, I said I was calling for Governor Stark, whose son
was there as a patient of Dr. Stanton, and could they please try to
dig up something. They came back with the report that Dr. Stanton
had been expected well before seven, that he had had an appoint-
ment with another doctor to examine some plates, but that he had
not come. They had been unable to locate him at his office or at
home. Would I like to leave a message for Dr. Stanton when he
came in? I said, yes, to have him get in touch with me at the earliest
possible moment, it was important. I would leave word at my own
hotel as to my whereabouts.

I went back to my hotel and had a meal in the coffee shop, hav-
ing left word at the desk to page me if a call came. But none came.
So I dawdled in the lobby with the evening papers. The Chronicle
had a long editorial lauding the courage and sound sense of the
handful of men in the Senate who were making a fight against the
administration’s tax bill, which would throttle business and enter-
prise in the state. There was a cartoon opposite the editorial. It

416

showed the Boss, or rather, a figure with the Boss’s head but a
great swollen belly, dressed in a Buster Brown suit with the little
pants tight above great hairy thighs. On one knee the monster bal-
anced a big pudding and from the gaping hole in the top had just
plucked a squirming little creature. The pudding bore the label
The State and the squirming little creature the label Hardworking
Citizen. From the mouth of die Boss’s head came one of those bal-
loons of words the comic-strip artists use to indicate the speech of
their characters. It said: '‘Oh, what a good boy am I!” Under the
cartoon was the caption: Little Jack Horner.

I read on down through the editorial. It said that our state was
a poor state, and could not bear the burden thus t)Tannicaliy im-
posed upon it. That was an old one. Every time the Boss had
cracked down— income tax, mineral-extraction tax, liquor tax, every
time— it had been the same thing. The pocketbook is where it hurts.
A man may forget the death of the father, but never the loss of the
patrimony, the cold-faced Florentine, who is the founding father
of our modern world, said, and he said a mouthful.

This is a poor state, the opposition always screamed. But the
Boss said: “There is a passel of pore folks living in it and no mis-
take, but the state isn’t poor. It is just a question of who has got
his front feet in the trough when slopping time comes. And I aim
to do me some shoving and thump me some snouts.” And he had
leaned forward to the crowd, with the shagged-down forelock and
the bulging eyes, and had lifted his right arm to demand of them
and of the hot sky, “Are you with me? Are you with me?” And the
roar had come.

More money for graft, the opposition always screamed. “Sure,”
the Boss had said, lounging easy, “sure, there’s some graft, but
there’s just enough to make the wheels turn without squeaking.
And remember this. There never was a machine rigged up by man
didn’t represent some loss of energy. How much energy do you
get out of a lump of coal when you run a steam dynamo or a loco-
motive compared to what there actually is in that lump of coal?
Damned little. Well, we do a hell of a lot better than the best
dynamo or locomotive ever invented. Sure, I got a bunch of crooks
around here, but they’re too lily-livered to get very crooked. I got
my eye on ’em. And do I deliver the state something? I damned
well do.”

The theory of historical costs, you might put it. All change costs
something. You have to write off the costs against the gain. Maybe
in our state change could only come in the terms in which it was
taking place, and it was sure due for some change. The theory of

417

the moral neutrality o£ history, you might call it. Process as process
is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but
not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which
is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is
bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The theory of historical costs. The theory of die moral neutral-
ity of history. Ail that was a high historical view from a chilly pin-
nacle. Maybe it took a genius to see it. To really see it. Maybe you
had to get chained to the high pinnacle with the buzzards pecking
at your liver and lights before you could see it. Maybe it took a
genius to see it. Maybe it took a hero to act on it.

But sitting there in the lobby, waiting for the call which did not
come, I w^as willing to let those speculations rest. I went back to
the editorial. That editorial was shadow-boxing, all right. It was
shadow-boxing, for at the very minute it was just as likely true as
not that the vote was being called up in the Capitol, and it would
take the winged hosts to make the vote different from what it was
going to be after the MacMurfee boys had talked themselves out
and the count was called.

It was around nine o’clock when I was paged. But it wasn’t
Adam. It was a message from the Capitol saying the Boss was there
and wanted me to come up. I left word at the desk that if Dr.
Stanton should call me, he was to be asked to call the Capitol,
I would leave instructions with the operator on the switchboard
there. Then I rang up Anne to give her the news, or rather, the
no-news, about my efforts to date. She sounded calm and tired.
I went out to my car. It had been raining again, for the gutter by
the curb was running with a black stream which gleamed like oil
in the lights of the street. But it had let up now.

When I pulled into the Capitol grounds I saw that the place was
pretty well lit up. But that wasn’t surprising, even at that hour,
when the Legislature was in session. And when I got inside, the
place was certainly not uninhabited. The solons had broken up
shop for the evening and were milling about in the corridors, espe-
cially at those strategic points where the big brass spittoons stood.
And there were plenty of other people around, too. There were a
lot of reporters, and herds of bystanders, those people who love to
have the feeling that they are around when something big is hap-
pening.

I worked through the place and up to the Boss’s office. They
told me there that he had gone down with somebody to the Senate.

“There wasn’t any hitch about the tax bill passing, was there?"
I asked the girl.

418

“Don’t be silly/’ the girl said.

I started to tell her that I had been around there back when she
was lying in the crib sucking her thumb, but didn’t do it. Instead,
I asked her to take care of the business of Adam’s call for me, and
went down to the Senate.

At first I didn’t spot the Boss. Then I saw him off to one side,
with a couple of the Senators and Calvin Sperling and discreetly
in the background several other men, just hangers-on who were
warming their hands at the blaze of greatness. Over to one side of
the Boss, I saw Sugar-Boy lounging against the marble wall, with
his cheeks drawn in to suck the sugar cube w^hich, at that moment
no doubt, was dissolving its bliss down his gullet. The Boss stood
with his hands clasped behind him and his head hanging a little
forward. He was listening to something one of the Senators was
telling him.

I approached the group and stood back from it, waiting. In a
minute I caught the Boss’s eye and knew that he had seen me. So
I went over to Sugar-Boy and said, “Hello.”

He managed to get the word out after several efforts. Then he
resumed work on the sugar. I leaned against the wall beside him,
and waited.

Four or five minutes passed, and the Boss still stood there with
his head hanging forward, listening. He could listen a long time
and not say a word, just let the fellow pour it out. The stuff would
pour out and pour out, and the Boss would just be waiting to see
what was in the bottom of the bucket. Finally, I knew that he had
had enough. He knew what was in the bottom of the fellow’s
bucket or that there wasn’t anything there, after all. I knew that he
had had enough, for I saw him suddenly lift his head up sharp and
look straight at the man. That was the sign. I stopped leaning
against the wall. I knew the Boss was ready to go.

He looked at the man and shook his head. “It won’t wash,” he
said in a perfectly amiable fashion. It was loud enough for me to
hear. The other fellow had been talking low and fast.

Then the Boss looked over at me and called, “Jack.”

I went to him.

“Let’s get upstairs,” he said to me, “I want to tell you some-
thing.”

“O.K.,” I said, and started toward the door.

He left the men and followed me, catching up with me at the
door. Sugar-Boy fell in just on his other side and a little back.

I started to ask the Boss how the boy was, but thought better of
it. It was just a question of the kind of badness, and there wasn’t

419

any use asking about that. So we moved on through the corridor
to the big lobby, where we would take an elevator up to his office.
Some of the men lounging along tlie corridor stepped back a little
and said, “Howdy-do, Governor/' or “Hi, Boss," but the Boss only
bowed his response to the greetings. The other men, those who
said nothing, turned their heads to watch the Boss as he passed.
There wasn't anything out of the ordinary about all that. He must
have passed down that corridor a thousand times, or near that
many, with men calling out to him, or saying nothing and follow-
ing with their eyes his progress over the glittering marble.

We came out into the great lobby, under the dome, where there
was a blaze of light over the statues which stood widi statesmanlike
dignity on pedestals to mark the quarters of the place, and over
the people w’-ho moved about in the area. We walked along the
east wall, tow^ard the inset where the elevators were. Just as we
approached the statue of General Moffat (a great Indian fighter, a
successful land speculator, the first governor of the state), I noticed
a figure leaning against the pedestal.

It was Adam Stanton. I saw that his clothes were soaked and that
mud and filth were slopped up his trousers half to the knees. I
understood the abandoned car. He had walked away from it, in the
rain.

Just as I saw him, he looked in our direction. But his eyes were
on the Boss, not on me. “Adam," I said, “Adam!"

He took a step toward us, but still did not look at me.

Then the Boss veered toward Adam, and thrust out his hand in
preparation for a handshake. “Howdy-do, Doctor," he began, hold-
ing out his hand.

For an instant Adam stood there immobile, as though about to
refuse to shake the hand of the man approaching him. Then he
put out his hand, and as he did so I felt a surge of relief and
thought: He"s shaking hands with him, he's all right now, he's all
right.

Then I saw what was in his hand, and even as I recognized the
object, but before the significance of the recognition had time to
form itself in my mind and nerves, I saw the two little spurts of
pale-orange flame from the muzzle of the weapon.

I did not hear the report, for it was lost and merged with the
other more positive staccato series of reports, on my left. With his
right arm still extended Adam reeled back a step, swung his re-
proachful and haggard gaze upon me and fixed it, even as a second
burst of firing came and he spun to the floor.

In the astonishing silence, I rushed toward Adam as he fell. Then

420

I heard somewhere in the lobby a woman begin screaming, then
a great rush of feet and babble of voices. Adam was bleeding heav-
ily. He was stitched across the chest. The chest was all knocked in.
He was already dead.

I looked up to see Sugar-Boy standing there with the smoking
automatic in his hand, and off to the right, near the elevator, a
highway patrolman with a pistol in his hand.

I didn’t see the Boss. And thought: He didn't hit him.

But I was wrong. Even as I thought that and looked around,
Sugar-Boy dropped his automatic clattering to the marble, and
uttering some strangled, animal-like sound, rushed back beyond
the statue of Governor Moffat.

I laid Adam’s head back on the marble and went beyond the
statue. I had to shove the people back now, they were crowding so.
Somebody was yelling, ‘‘Stand back, stand back, give him air!” But
they kept crowding up, running to the spot from all over the lobby
and from the corridors.

When I broke through, I saw the Boss sitting on the floor,
breathing heavily, staring straight ahead. He had both hands
pressed to his body, low on the chest and toward the center. I could
see no sign that he was hit. Then I saw a very little ooze of blood
between two of the fingers, just a little.

Sugar-Boy was leaning above him, weeping and sputtering, trying
to speak. He finally managed to get out the words: “D-d-d-d-does it
hur-hur-hur-hurt much, Boss— does it hur-hur-hur-hurt?”

The Boss did not die there in the lobby under the dome. In fact,
he lived quite a while and died on a clean, white, antiseptic bed,
with all the benefits of science. For a couple of days it was given
out that he would not die at all. He was seriously wounded— there
were two little .25-caliber slugs in his body, slugs from a little toy
target pistol Adam had had since he was a kid— but an operation
was possible, and he was a very strong man.

So there was all over again the business of the waiting room with
the potted plants and water colors and artificial logs on the cozy
hearth. A sister of Lucy Stark came with Lucy the morning of the
operation. Old Man Stark, the Boss’s father, was too feeble to leave
Mason City. You could see that Luq^’s sister, a woman a good deal
older than Lucy, dressed in country black with high-laced black
kid shoes, was a strong-minded, sensible woman who had been
through a lot and knew how to help somebody else through. You
could look at her squarish, slightly reddened, coarse-skinned hands*
with their square-cut nails, and know that she knew how to take

421

hold. When she entered the waiting room there at the hospital and
cast a practiced and critical, not quite scornful, glance over the
potted plants and the artificial logs, it was like a pilot mounting
to the pilothouse and taking over.

She sat very stiff and severe in a chair, not one of the chintz-
covered soft ones. She was going to permit no spilling over of
emotion, not in a strange room and at that time of day— the time
of day when every day there was breakfast to get and the children
to fix and the men to clear out of the house. There would be ^
proper place and time. After it was over, after she got Lucy home,
she would put her to bed in a room with the curtains drawn, and
would put a cloth dabbled wdth vinegar on her forehead, and would
sit by the bed and hold her hand, and would say, ‘‘Now just you
cry if you want to, baby, then you’ll feel better, then you lie still
and I’ll sit here, I won’t leave you, baby.” But that would come
later. Meanwhile Lucy now and then stole a look across at her
sister’s hewn and eroded face. It wasn’t exactly a sympathetic face,
but it seemed to have what Lucy was looking for.

I sat over on the couch and looked at the same old picture maga-
zines. I felt definitely that I was out of place. But Lucy had asked
me to come. “He would want you to be there,” she had said.

“I’ll wait down in the lobby,” I said.

She shook her head. “Come upstairs,” she said.

“I don’t want to be underfoot. Your sister will be there, you
said.”

“I want you to,” she had said, and so there I was. And it was
better, I decided, even if I was out of place, than being down in
the lobby with all the newshawks and politicos and curiosity-
seekers.

It didn’t take them awfully long. They said the operation was a
success. When the nurse who had brought tlie news said that, Lucy
slumped in her chair and uttered a dry, gasping sob. The sister,
who herself had seemed to relax a little at tire words, looked
sharply at Lucy. “Lucy,” she said, not loud but with some severity,
“Lucy!”

Lucy raised her head, met the sister’s reproving gaze, murmured
humbly, “I’m sorry, Ellie, I’m sorry. It’s just that I've— I’ve— ”

“We must thank God,” Ellie announced. Then she rose briskly,
as though she were about to step right out and do that before it
slipped her mind. But she turned to the nurse. “When can she see
her husband?” she asked.

“It will be some time,” the nurse said, “I can’t tell you exactly,
but it will be some time. If you wait here I can let you know.”

422

She moved to the door. There she turned, and asked, “Can I get
anything for you? Some lemonade? Some coffee?''

“That’s right kind and considerate," the sister said. we'll
just say no thanks this time of morning."

The nurse went out, and I excused myself and followed. I went
down to the office of Dr. Simmons, who had performed the opera-
tion. I had known him around the place. He was a sort of friend
of Adam— about as good a one as Adam had, for he never had
chummed up with anybody, that is, anybody except me, and I
didn’t count, for I was the Friend of His Youth. I had known Dr.
Simmons around the place. Adam had introduced us.

Dr. Simmons, a dry, thin, grayish man, was at his desk, writing
something on a big card. I told him to finish what he was doing.
He said he was about through, the secretary picked up the card
and put it into a filing cabinet, and he turned to me. I asked him
how the Governor was doing. The operation had been a success,
he said.

“You mean you got the bullets out?" I asked.

He smiled in a sort of chilly way, and said he meant a little more
than that. “He's got a chance," he said. “He’s a strong man."

“He’s that," I agreed.

Dr. Simmons picked up a little envelope from his desk, and
emptied the contents into his hand. “No matter how strong they
are they can’t take much of this diet," he said, and held out his
hand, open, to show me the two little pellets resting there. A .25-
caliber slug is small, all right, but these looked even smaller and
more trivial than I had remembered.

I picked one of them out of his hand and examined it. It was a
little misshapen slug of lead. Fingering it, I thought of how a long
time back, when we were kids at the Landing, Adam and I used
to shoot at a pine board, and how sometimes we had dug the slugs
out of the soft wood with a pocketknife. Sometimes the slugs dug
out of the wood hadn’t been a bit more misshapen than this one,,
the wood was so soft.

“The son-of-a-bitch," Dr. Simmons said irrelevantly.

I gave the slug back to him and went down to the lobby. It was
pretty well cleared out down there now. The politicos had gone.
Two or three newspapermen still hung around, waiting for devel-
opments.

There weren’t any developments that day. Or the next day either.
The Boss seemed to be getting on all right. But the third day he
took a turn for the worse. An infection had started up. It moved

423

pretty fast. I knew from the way Dr. Simmons looked, even if he
wouldn’t say much, that he was a gone gosling.

That evening, shortly after I had arrived at the hospital and had
gone up to the %vaiting room to see how Lucy was making out, I
got the message that the Boss wanted to see me. He had rallied,
they said.

He was a sick-Iooking customer when I saw him. The flesh had
fallen away on his face till the skin sacked off the bone the way it
does on an old man’s face. He looked like Old Man Stark, up at
Mason City. He was white as chalk.

Wflien I first saw the eyes in the white face, they seemed to be
filmed and unrecognizing. Then, as I moved toward the bed, they
fixed on me and a thin light flickered up in them. His mouth
twisted a little in a way which I took to be the feeble shorthand
for a grin.

I came over dose to the bed. *‘Hello, Boss,” I said, and hung
something on my features which I meant to be taken for a grin.

He lifted the forefinger and the next finger of his right hand,
which lay prone on the sheet, in an incipient salute, then let them
drop. The strength of the musdes which held his mouth twisted
gave out, too, and the grin slid off his face and the weight of flesh
sagged back.

I stood up dose to the bed and looked down at him, and tried to
think of something to say. But my brain felt as juiceless as an old
sponge left out in the sun a long time.

Then he said, in something a little better than a whisper, '1
wanted to see you, Jack.”

”I wanted to see you, too. Boss.”

For a minute he didn’t speak, but his eyes looked up at me, with
the light still flickering in them. Then he spoke: ”Why did he do it
to me?”

”Oh, God damn it,” I burst out, very loud, ”I don’t know.”

The nurse looked warningly at me.
never did anything to him,” he said.

*'No, you never did.”

He was silent again, and the flicker went down in his eyes. Then,
was all right. The Doc.”

I nodded.

I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn’t going to say any
more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he
was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very
slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painM creak

424

of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He
said, “It might have been all different. Jack,*'

I nodded again.

He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift
his head from the pillow. “You got to believe that,“ he said
hoarsely.

The nurse stepped forward and looked significantly at me.

“Yes,” I said to the man on the bed.

“You got to,” he said again. “You got to believe that.”

“All right.”

He looked at me, and for a moment it w^as the old strong, prob-
ing, demanding glance. But when the words came this time, they
were very weak. “And it might even been different yet,” he whis-
pered, “If it hadn't happened, it might— have been different— even
yet.”

He barely got the last words out, he was so weak.

The nurse was making signals to me.

I reached down and took the hand on the sheet. It felt like a piece
of jelly.

“So long, Boss,” I said. “I'll be seeing you.”

He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t even sure that there was recogni-
tion in the eyes now. I turned away and went out.

He died the next morning, just about day. There was a hell of a
big funeral. The city was jam-packed with people, all kinds of
people, county-courthouse slickers and red-necks and wool-hat boys
and people who had never been on pavement before. And they had
their women with them. They filled ail the space around the Capi-
tol and spilled and eddied back into the streets beyond, while the
drizzle came down and the loud-speakers placed on the trees and
poles blared out the words which made you want to puke.

Then after the coffin had been brought down the great steps of
the Capitol and loaded into the hearse and after the state patrol-
men and the mounted cops had fought out a passage, the procession
rolled slowly away to the cemetery. The crowd seethed after it At
the cemetery they surged and swayed over the grass, trampling the
graves, breaking down shrubbery. A couple of gravestones were
overturned and broken. It was two hours after the burial before the
police managed to clear the place.

That was my second funeral within a week. The first one had
been very different. It had been the funeral of Adam Stanton, down
at Burden’s Landing.

Chapter Ten

AFTER the Boss was safe underground, and the pussel-gutted city
cops sweating in their blue and the lean, natty boys of the State
Patrol and the mounted police on glossy, dancing horses whose
hoofs sank fetlock deep in the flower beds had driven the crowd
sullenly out of the cemetery— but long before the tramped grass be-
gan to lift itself or the caietakers came to repair the knocked-over
tombstones— I left town and took out for the Landing. There were
two reasons. First, I couldn't stand to stay in town. Second, Anne
Stanton was at the Landing.

She had been there since Adam’s funeral. She had gone down
with the body, trailing the sun-glittering, expensive hearse in an
undertaker’s limousine with a nurse, who proved to be superfluous,
and Katy Maynard, an old friend who proved, no doubt, to be
superfluous, too. I didn’t see her as she sat in the rented limousine
which moved at its decorous torturer’s pace the near-hundred miles,
lifting the miles slowly off the concrete slab, slowly and fastidiously
as though you were peeling an endless strip of skin off the live flesh.
I didn’t see her, but I know how she had been; erect, white in the
face, the beautiful bones of her face showing under the taut flesh,
her hands clenched in her lap. For that was the way she was when
I saw her standing under the moss-garlanded oaks, looking abso-
lutely alone despite the nurse and Katy Maynard and all the people
—friends of the family, curiosity-seekers come to gloat and nudge,
newspapermen, big-shot doctors from town and from Baltimore and
Philadelphia— who stood there while the shovels did their work.

And she was that way when she walked out of the place, not
leaning on anybody, with the nurse and Katy Maynard trailing
along with that look of embarrassed and false piety which people
get on their faces when they are caught in the open with the princi-
pal mourner at a funeral.

Even when— just as she was coming out the gate of the cemetery—

426

a newspaperman jammed a camera at her and took her picture,
she didn't change the expression on her face.

He was sail there when I came up, a squirt with his hat over one
eye and the camera hung round his neck and a grin on his squirt
face. I thought maybe I had seen him around town, but maybe not,
the squirts look so much alike when they grind them out of jour-
nalism school. “Hello," I said.

He said hello.

“I saw you get that picture," I said.

He said yeah.

“Well, son," I said, “if you live long enough, you’ll find out there
are some kinds of a son-of-a-bitch you don’t have to be even to be a
newspaperman. "

He said yeah, out of his squirt face, and looked at me. Then he
asked, “You’re Burden?"

I nodded.

“Jesus Christ," he exclaimed, “you work for Stark and you call
somebody a son-of-a-bitch."

I just looked at him. I’d been over all that ground before. I had
been ovei it a thousand times with a thousand people. Hotel lobbies
and dinner tables and club cars and street comers and bedrooms
and filling stations. Sometimes they didn’t say it just exactly that
way and sometimes they didn’t say it at all, but it was there. Oh,
I’d fixed them, all right. I knew how to roll with that punch and
give it right back in the gut. I ought to have known, Fd had plenty
of practice.

But you get tired. In a way it is too easy, and so it isn’t fun any
more. And then you get so you don’t get mad any more, it has hap
pened so often. But those aren't the reasons. It is just that those
people who say that to you—or don’t say it— aren’t right and they
aren’t wrong. If it were absolutely either way, you wouldn’t have
to think about it, you could just shut your eyes and let them have it
in the gut. But the trouble is, they are half right and half wrong,
and in the end that is what paralyzes you. Trying to sort out the
one from the other. You can’t explain it to them, for there isn’t ever
time and there is always that look on their faces. So you get to a
point in the end where you don’t even let them have it in the gut.
You just look at them, and it is like a dream or something remem-
bered from a long time back or like they weren’t there at all.

So I just looked at the squirt face.

There were other people there. They were looking at me. They
expected me to say something. Or do something. But somehow I
didn’t even mind their eyes on me. I didn’t even hate them. I didn’t

427

feel anything except a kind of numbness and soreness inside, more
numbness than soreness. I stood there and looked at him and waited
the way you wait for the pain to start after you have been hit, Then^
if the pain started, I would give it to him. But it didn’t start, and
there was just the numbness. So I turned around and walked away,
I didn’t even mind the eyes that were following me or the snatch
of a laugh somebody gave and cut off short because it was a funeraL

I walked on do^m the street with the numbness and soreness in
me. But what had happened at the gate hadn’t given it to me, I
had had it before I came.

I went on down tlie Row toward the Stanton house. I didn’t im-
agine she’d want to see me right then, but I intended to leave word
that I w^ould be at the hotel down at the Landing till late afternoon.
This, of course, if something didn’t break about the Boss's condh
tion.

But when I got to the Stanton house I learned that Anne wasn’t
seeing anybody. Katy Maynard and the nurse weren’t superfluous
any more. For when Anne entered the house she went into the liv-
ing room and stood there just inside the door and looked slowly all
over the place, at the piano, the furniture piece by piece, the pic-
ture above the fireplace, the way a woman looks over a room just
before she sails in to redecorate the place and rearrange the furni-
ture (that was Katy Maynard’s way of putting it), and then she just
gave down. She didn't even reach for the doorjamb, or stagger, or
make a sound, they said. She just gave down, now it was over, and
was out cold on the floor.

So when I got there, the nurse was upstairs working on her, and
Katy Maynard was calling the doctor and taking charge. There
wasn’t any reason for me to stay. I got in my car and headed back
to the city.

But now the Boss was dead, too, and I was back at the Landing.
My mother and her Theodore were off on a trip and I had the
house to myself. It was as empty and still as a morgue. But even
so, it was a bit more cheerful than the hospitals and cemeteries i
had been hanging around. What was dead in this house had been
dead a long time, and I was accustomed to the fact. I was even be-
coming accustomed to the fact of the other deaths. They had
shoveled it over Judge Irwin, and Adam Stanton, and the Boss.

But there were some of us left. And Anne Stanton was among
those left. And I was.

So back at the Landing again, we sat on the gallery side by side,
when there was sun— the lemon-pale sun of late autunon— and the
afternoon made its shortened arc over the onyx-mottled waters of

428

the bay, which stretched south to the autumn-hazy horizon. Or
when there wasn’t any sun, and the wind piled the sea up over the
beach, even to the road, and the sky seemed to be nothing but gusty
rain, we sat side by side in die living room. Either place, we never
talked much those days, not because there was nothing to say but
because there might be too much and if you once started you would
upset the beautiful and perilous equilibrium which we had achieved.
It was as though we each sat on the end of a seesaw, beautifully bal-
anced, but not in any tidy little play yard but over God knows xvhat
blackness on a seesaw which God had rigged up for us kiddies. And
if either of us should lean toward the other, even a fraction of an
inch, the balance would be upset and we would both go sliding oj0E
into that blackness. But we fooled God, and didn’t say a word.

We didn’t say a word, but some afternoons I read to Anne. I read
the first book I had laid hand to the first afternoon when I found I
couldn’t sit there any longer in that silence which bulged and
creaked with all the unsaid words. It was the first volume of the
works of Anthony Trollope. That was a safe bet. Anthony never
upset any equilibriums.

In a peculiar way those late-autumn days began to remind me of
the summer almost twenty years before when I had fallen in love
with Anne. That summer we had been absolutely alone, together,
even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of
floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. And now we
were absolutely alone, but it was a different kind of floating island
or magic carpet. That summer we had seemed to be caught in a
massive and bemusing tide which knew its own pace and time and
would not be hurried even to the happiness which it surely prom*’
ised. And now again we seemed to be caught in such a tide and
couldn’t lift a finger in its enormous drift, for it knew its own pace
and time. But what it promised we didn’t know. I did not even
wonder.

Now and then, however, I wondered about something else. Some-
times when I was sitting beside her, reading or not talking, and
sometimes when I was away, eating breakfast or walking down the
Row or lying awake. There was a question without an answer.
When Anne had told me about Adam’s last, wild visit to her apart-
ment—how he rushed in and said he wouldn’t be pimp for her and
all that— she had said that some man had telephoned Adam to tell
him about her and Governor Stark.

Whof

In the first days after the event I had really forgotten the fact, but
then the question came. At first, even then, the question didn’t seem

429

important to me. For nothing seemed very important to me then, in
the pervasive soreness and numbness. Or at least what seemed im-
portant to me then had nothing to do with the question. What had
happened was important, but not the cause of what had happened,
in so far as such a cause was not in me mjself.

But die question kept coming back. Even when I wasn’t thinking
of it, I would sudden!) be aware of its gnawing like a mouse’s tooth
stitching away inside the wainscoting of my mind.

For a w^hiie I didn’t see how I could ask Anne, I couldn’t ever
say anything to her about what had happened. We would sit forever
in our conspiracy of silence, forever bound together in that con-
spiracy by our awareness of our earlier, unwitting conspiracy to
commit Adam Stanton and Willie Stark to each other and to their
death. (If we should ever break the conspiracy of silence we might
have to face the fact of that other conspiracy and have to look down
and see the blood on our hands.) So I said nothing.

Until the day when I had to say it.

I said, ‘‘Anne, I’m going to ask you one question. About— about—
it. Then I’ll never say another word about it to you unless you
speak up first.”

She looked at me without answering. But I could see in her eyes
the recoil of fear and pain, and then the stubborn mustering of
what forces she had.

So I plunged on, “You told me— that day when I came to your
apartment— that somebody had telephoned Adam— had told him—
had told him about—”

“About me,” she said, finishing the sentence on which I had, for
the moment, wavered. She hadn’t waited for the impact. With what-
ever force she had she was meeting it head-on.

I nodded.

“Well?” she queried.

“Did he say who had telephoned him?”

She thought a minute. You could see her, even as she sat there,
lifting the sheet off that moment when Adam had burst in on her,
like somebody lifting the sheet off the face of a corpse on a marble
slab in a morgue and peering into the face.

Then she shook her head. “No,” she said, “he didn’t say—” she
hesitated— “except that it was a man. I’m sure he said man.”

So we resumed our conspiracy of silence, while the seesaw wav-
ered and swayed beneath us and the black clawed up at us and we
clung pn.

I left the Landing the next day.

I got to town in the late afternoon, and put in a call to Sadie

4S0

Burke^s apartment. There was no answer. So I tried the Capitol, on
the off chance that she would be there, but there was no answer on
her extension. Off and on during the evening I tried her apartment
number, but with no luck. I didn’t go around to the Capitol to see
her in the morning. I didn’t want to see the gang who would be
there. I didn’t ever w^ant to see them again.

So I telephoned again. Her extension didn’t answer. So I asked
the switchboard to find out if possible where she was. After two or
three minutes the voice said, ‘‘She is not here. She is ill. Will that
be all, please?” Then before I could put my thoughts in order, I
heard the click of being cut off.

I rang again.

“This is Jack Burden,” I said, “and I’d like to—”

“Oh— Mr. Burden—” the switchboard said noncommittally, or
perhaps in question.

There had been a time and it hadn’t been very long back when
the name Jack Burden got something done around that joint. But
that voice, the tone of that voice, told me that the name Jack Bur-
den didn’t mean a damned thing but a waste of breath around there
any more.

For a second I was sore as hell. Then I remembered that things
had changed.

Things had changed out there. When things change in a place
like that, things change fast and all the way down, and the voice at
the switchboard gets a new tone when it speaks your name. I re-
membered how much things had changed. Then I wasn’t sore any
more, for I didn’t give a damn.

But I said sweetly, “I wonder if you can tell me how to get in
touch with Miss Burke. I’d sure appreciate it.”

Then I waited a couple of minutes for her to try to find out.

“Miss Burke is at the Millett Sanatorium,” the voice then said.

Cemeteries and hospitals: I was back in the swing of things, I
thought.

But the Millett place wasn’t like the hospital. It didn’t look at all
like a hospital, I discovered when I turned off the highway twenty-
five miles out of the city and tooled gently up the drive under the
magnificent groining of the century-old live oaks whose boughs met
above the avenue and dripped stalactites of moss to make a green,
aqueous gloom like a cavern. Between the regularly spaced oaks
stood pedestals on which classical marbles— draped and undraped,
male and female, stained by weathers and leaf acid and encroaching
lichen, looking as though they had, in fact, sprouted dully out of
the clinging black-green humus below them— stared out at the

431

passer-by with the faintly pained, heavy, incurious unamazement
of cattle. The gaze of those marble eyes must have been the first
stage m the treatment the neurotic got when he came out to the
sanatorium. It must have been like smearing a cool unguent of time
on the hot pustule and dry itch of the soul.

Then at the end of the avenue the neurotic reached the sana-
torium, which graciously promised peace beyond the white columns.
For the Millett Sanatorium was what is called a rest home. But it
had been built more than a century back for vanity and love by a
cotton snob to whom money had been no object, who had bought
near a shipload of Empire furniture in Paris for his house and near
a shipload of shining marble statues in Rome for his avenue, and
who had probably had a face like brutally hewed cedar and not a
nerve in his body, and now people who were descended from such
people, or who had enough money (made in the administration of
Grant or Coolidge) to assume that they were descended from such
people, brought their twitches, tics, kinks, and running sores out
here and rested in the high-ceilinged rooms and ate crawfish bisque
and were soothed by the voice of a psychiatrist in whose wide, un-
wavering, brown, liquid, depthless eyes one slowly drowned.

I almost drowned in those eyes during the one-minute interview
I had in order to get permission to see Sadie. '*She is very difficult,"
he said.

Sadie was lying on a chaise longue by a window which gave over
a stretch of lawn sloping down to a bayou. Her chopped-off black
hair was wild and her face was chalk-white and the afternoon light
striking across it made it look more than ever like the plaster-of-
Paris mask of Medusa riddled with BB shot. But it was a mask
flung down on a pillow and the eyes that looked out of it belonged
to the mask. They did not belong to Sadie Burke. There wasn’t any-
thing burning there.

"Hello, Sadie," I said, "I hope you don’t mind me coming to see
you."

She studied me a moment out of the unburning eyes. "It’s O.K.
with me," she said.

So I sat down and hitched my chair up closer and lighted a ciga-
rette.

"How you getting on?" I asked.

She turned her head in my direction and gave me another long
look. For an instant, there was a flicker in the eyes as when a breath
of air touches an ember. "Look here,” she said, "I’m getting on all
right. Why the hell shouldn’t I be getting on all right?"

"Thafs fine,^* I said.

432

*'I didn’t come out here because there was anytiiing wrong with
me. I came because I was tired. I wanted a rest. That’s what I said
to that God-damned doctor. I said, ‘I’m here to get a rest because
Fm tired and I don’t want you messing around and trying to swap
secrets with me and find out if I ever had any dreams about red fire
engines.’ I said, ‘If I ever started swapping secrets with you I’d burn
your ears off, but I’m here to rest and I don’t w^ant you in my hair/
I said, ‘I’m tired of a lot of things and I’m God-damned tired of a
lot of people and that goes for you, too, Doc.’ ”

She pushed herself up on one arm and looked at me. Then said,
“And that goes for you, too, Jack Burden.”

I didn’t say anything to that and I didn’t move. So she sank back
down, and into herself.

I let my cigarette burn up in my fingers and lighted another one
before I said, “Sadie, I reckon I know how you feel and I don’t want
to be bringing everything up again, but—”

“You don’t know a thing about how I feel,” she said.

“Some idea— maybe,” I said. “But what I came for was to ask you
a question.”

“I thought you came because you were so damned fond of me/’
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I am. We’ve been around a long
time together and we always got along. But that’s not—”

“Yeah,” she interrupted, and again thrust herself up on one arm,
“everything and everybody just got along fine. Oh, Jesus, just fine/’
I waited while she sank back again and turned her eyes from me
across the lawn below toward tire bayou. A crow was making its way
across the clear air above the tattered cypress tops beyond the bayou.
Then the crow was gone, and I said, “Adam Stanton killed the Boss,
but he never got that idea by himself. Somebody primed him to do
it. Somebody who knew the kind of man Adam w'as and knew the
inside of how he took the job at the medical center and knew—”
She didn’t seem to be listening to me. She was watching the clear
air above the tattered cypresses where the crow had gone. I hesi-
tated, and then, watching her face, went on. “—and knew about the
Boss and Anne Stanton.”

I waited again and watched her face as I handed those names to
her, but it didn’t show a thing. It simply looked tired, tired and
not giving a damn.

“I found out one thing,” I continued. “A man called up Adam
that afternoon and told him about the Boss and his sister. And
some more stuff. You can guess what stuff. So he went wild. He
went to see his sister and jumped her and she didn’t deny it. She
isn’t the kind of person who could deny it. I guess she was sick of

433

having a secret and she was almost glad not to have it any longer
and—'"

*Teah/" Sadie said, not turning to me, '*tell me how noble and
high-toned Anne Stanton is."

'Tm sorry," I said, and felt the blood flushing my face. "I guess
I did get off the point."

**1 guess you did, ail right."

I waited. Then, “That man who called up Adam, do you have
any notion who it was?"

She seemed to be turning that question over in her mind. If she
had heard it, for I couldn't be sure.

“Do you?" I asked.

“I don't have any notion," she said.

“No?"

“No," she said, still not looking at me, “and I don’t have to have
any. Because, you see, I know."

“Who?" I demanded. “Who?" And came up out of my chair.

“Duffy,” she said.

“I knew it!" I exclaimed, “I ought to have known it! It had
to be."

“If you knew it,” she said, “what the hell you come messing
around me for?"

“I had to be sure. I had to know. Really know. I—" I stopped
and stood there at the foot of the chaise longue and looked down at
her averted face, which the sunlight lay across. “You say you know
it was Duffy. How do you know?"

“God damn you. Jack Burden, God damn you," she said in a tired
voice, and turned her head to look up at me. Then looking at me,
she thrust herself up to a sitting position, and burst out in a voice
which all at once wasn't tired any more but angry and violent, “God
damn you, Jack Burden, what made you come here? What always
makes you mess in things? Why can’t you leave me alone? Why
can't you? Why?"

I stared down into the eyes, which in the pain-contorted face were
burning now and wild.

“How do you know?" I demanded softly.

“God damn you, Jack Burden, God damn you," she said like a
litany.

“How do you know?" I demanded, more softly than before—I was
almost whispering— and leaned down toward her.

“God damn you, Jack Burden," she said.

“How do you know?"

434

“Because—" she began, hesitated, and tossed her head in a des-
perate tired way like a fevered child on a pillow.

“Because?” I demanded.

“Because,” she said, and let herself fall back on the cushions of
the chaise longue, “I told him. I told him to do it.”

That was it. That was it, and I hadn’t guessed it. My knees gave
slowly do^vn, like a pneumatic jack letting down the weight of a
car to the floor, and I was back in my chair. There I was and there
Sadie Burke was, and I was looking at her as though I had never
seen her before.

After a minute, she said, ‘'Stop looking at me.” But there w^asn't
any heat in what she said.

I must have continued to look, for she said, as before, "Stop look-
ing at me.”

Then I heard my lips saying, as though to myself, “You killed
him.”

“All right,” she said, “all right, I killed him. He was throwing me
over. For good. I knew it was for good that time. For that Lucy.
After all I had done. After I made him. I told him I’d fix him, but
he turned that new sick smile of his on me like he was practicing to
be Jesus and took my hands in his, and asked me to understand—
understand, Jesus!— and just then like a flash I knew I’d kill him.”

“You killed Adam Stanton,” I said.

“Oh, God,” she breathed, “oh, God.”

“You killed Adam,” I repeated.

“Oh,” she breathed, “and I killed Willie. I killed him.”

“Yes,” 1 agi'eed, and nodded.

“Oh, God,” she said, and lay there staring up at the ceiling.

I had found out what I had come to find out. But I kept on sit*
ting there. I didn’t even light a cigarette.

After a while she said, “Come over here. Pull your chair over
here.”

I hitched my chair over by the chaise longue, and waited. She
didn’t look at me, but she reached out her right hand uncertainly
in my direction. I took it and held it while she continued to stare
at the ceiling and the afternoon light struck cruelly across her face.

“Jack,” she said, finally, still not looking at me.

“Yes?”

“I’m glad I told you,” she said, “I knew I had to tell somebody.
Sometime. I knew it would come, but there wasn’t anybody for me
to tell. Till you came. That’s why I hated you for coming. As soon
as you came in the door, I knew I’d have to tell you. But Fm glad

435

I told. I don’t care who knows now. I may not be noble and high-
toned like that Stanton woman, but I’m glad I told.”

I didn’t find much to say to that. So I continued to sit there for
quite a while, holding Sadie’s hand in the silence which she seemed
to want and looking across her down toward the bayou, which
coiled under the moss depending from the line of tattered cypresses
on the farther bank, the algae-mottled water heavy with the hint
and odor of swamp, jungle, and darkness, along the edge of the
expanse of clipped lawn.

I had found out that Tiny Duffj^, who was now Governor of the
state, had killed Willie Stark as surely as tliough his own hand had
held the revolver. I had also found out that Sadie Burke had put
the weapon into Duffy's hand and had aimed it for him, that she,
too, had killed Willie Stark. And Adam Stanton. But what she had
done had been done hot. What Duffy had done had been done
cold. And, in the end, Sadie Burke’s act had somehow been wiped
out. It did not exist for me any more.

And that left Duffy. Duffy had done it. And strangely, there was a
great joy and relief in that knowledge. Duffy had done it, and that
made everything clear and bright as in frosty sunshine. There, over
yonder, was Tiny Duffy with his diamond ring, and over here was
Jack Burden. I felt free and dean, as when you suddenly see that,
after being paralyzed by ignorance or indecision, you can act. I felt
on the verge of the act.

But I did not know what the act was to be.

When I went back out to see Sadie— she had asked me to come
back— she told me, without my saying a word on the subject, that
she %vould make a statement if I wanted her to. I told her that that
was wonderful, and I felt that it was wonderful for I still felt clean
and free, on the verge of the act, and she was putting the thing into
my hand. I thanked her.

‘‘Don’t thank me,” she said, “Fm doing myself a favor. Duffy—
Duffy—” she rose to a sitting position on the chaise longue and her
eyes had the old flash— ‘you know what he did?”

Before I could answer she plunged on, “Afterwards— after it had
happened— I didn’t feel a thing. Not a thing. I knew that night what
had happened, and I didn’t feel a thing. And next morning Duffy
came to me— he was grinning and puifing— and he said, ‘Girlie, I’ll
sure hand it to you, I’ll sure hand it to you/ I still didn’t feel a
thing, not even when I looked in his face. But then he put his hand
around my shoulder and sort of patted and rubbed my back be-
tween the shotilder blades, and said, ‘Girlie, you sure stopped his

436

dock and I ain’t forgetting you, and girlie, you and me, we might
sure get along.’ Then it happened. It happened right then. It was
like it had all happened that second, right in front of me instead
of up at the Capitol. And I clawed at him and jumped away. I ran
out of the place. And three days later, after he died, I came here. It
was the only place I could come.”

“Well, thanks anyway,” I said. “I reckon we can stop DuflEy’s
clock.”

“It won’t stick in law,” she said.

“I didn’t reckon it would. Whatever you said to him or he said
to you doesn’t prove a thing. But there are other ways.”

She thought awhile. Then, “Any other way, law or not, and I
reckon you know it drags that—” she hesitated, and did not say
what she was about to say, then revised it— “drags Anne Stanton
into it.”

“She’ll do it,” I affirmed. “I know she would.”

Sadie shrugged. “You know what you want,” she said, “you all.”

“I want to get Duffy.”

“That suits me,” she said, and again shrugged. Suddenly she
seemed to have gone tired again. “That suits me,” she repeated,
“but the world is full of Duffys. It looks like I been knowing them
all my life.”

“I’m just thinking about one,” I declared.

I was still thinking about that one about a week later (by this
time it seemed that the only way was to break the thing through an
antiadministration paper), when I got the note from that particular
Duffy himself. Would I mind coming to see him, it said. At my con-
venience.

My convenience was immediately, and I found him imperially
and porcinely filling his clothes and the great leather couch in the
library at the Mansion where the Boss used to sit. The leather of his
shoes aeaked as he stepped forward to greet me, but his body
swayed with the bloated lightness of a drowned body stirred loose
at last from the bottom mud of the river to rise majestically and
swayingly to the surface. We shook hands and he smiled. And
waved me to a seat as the couch groaned to receive him.

A black boy in a white coat brought the drinks. I took the drink
but declined a cigar, and waited.

He said how sad it was about the Boss. I nodded.

He said how the boys all missed the Boss. I nodded to that.

He said how things were getting done though. Just like the Boss
would have wanted. I nodded to that

He said how they sure missed the Boss, though. I nodded to that

He said, ‘‘Jack, the boys sure miss you around here, too.”

I nodded modestly and said that I sure missed the boys.

“Yeah,” he resumed, “I was saying to myself the other day, just
let me get settled into harness and I’m going to get hold of Jack.
Yeah, Jack’s the kind of fellow I like to have around. The Boss sure
thought a lot of him, and what was good enough for the Boss is
good enough for old Tiny. Yeah, I said to myself, I’m gonna get
old Jack. The kind of guy I need. A square-shooter. A guy you can
trust. He’ll speak the truth, fear nor favor. His wwd is his bond.”

“Are you referring to me?” I asked.

“I sure am,” he replied. “And I'm making you a proposition. I
don’t exactly know" what arrangement you had with the Boss, but
you just tell me straight what it was and I’ll up it ten per cent.”

“I had no complaints about my treatment.”

“Now that’s talking like a white man, Jack,” he said, and added
earnestly, “And don’t get me wrong, I know you and the Boss was
like that.” He held up two large, white, glistening episcopal fingers
as in benediction. “Like that,” he repeated. “And don’t get me
wrong, I’m not criticizing the Boss. I just want to show you I appre-
ciate you.”

“Thanks,” I said with some lack of warmth.

The lack of warmth was such, I presume, that he leaned slightly
forward and said, “Jack, I’m going to make that twenty per cent.”

“That’s not enough,” I said.

“Jack,” he said, “you’re right. That’s not enough. Twenty-five
per cent.”

I shook my head.

He showed a slight uneasiness and the couch creaked, but he
rallied with a smile. “Jack,” he said soothingly, “you just tell me
what you think’s right, and I’ll see how we make out. You tell me
what’s enough.”

“There ain’t enough,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Listen,” I said, “didn’t you just tell me that I am the guy whose
word is his bond?”

“Yeah, Jack.”

“So you’ll believe me if I tell you something?”

“Why, yeah. Jack.”

“Well, I’m telling you something. You are the stinkingest louse
God ever let live.”

I relished the moment of profound silence wliich followed, then
plunged on, “And you think you can buy me in. Well, I know why

438

you want to. You don't know how much I know or what. I was thick
with the Boss and I know a lot. I’m the joker in the deck. My name
is Jack and I’m the wild jack and I’m not one-eyed. You want to
deal me to yourself from the bottom of the deck. But it’s no sale,
Tiny, it’s no sale. And it’s too damned bad, Tiny. And do }ou know
why?’*

“Look here!” he said with authority. “Look here, you can’t be—”

“It’s too bad because I do know something. I know a lot. I know
that you killed the Boss.”

“It’s a liel” he exclaimed, and heaved on the couch and the couch
creaked.

“It’s no lie. And it’s no guess. Though I ought to have guessed it.
Sadie Burke told me. She—”

“She’s in it, she’s in it!”

“She was in it,” I corrected, “but not any more. And she’ll tell the
world. She doesn’t care who knows. She’s not afraid.”

“She better be. I’ll—”

“She’s not afraid, because she’s tired. She’s tired of everything and
she’s tired of you.”

“I’ll kill her,” he said, and the perspiration exuded delicately on
his temples.

“You won’t kill anybody,” I said, “and this time there’s nobody
to do it for you. For you’re afraid to. You were afraid to kill the
Boss and you were afraid not to, but luck helped you out. But you
gave luck a little push, Tiny, and I swear, I admire you for it. It
opened my eyes. You see, Tiny, all those years I never thought you
were real. You were just something off the cartoon page. With your
diamond ring. You were just the punching bag the Boss used, and
you just grinned your sick grin and took it. You were like the
poodle I heard about. You ever hear about the poodle?”

I didn’t give him time to answer. I watched his mouth get ready,
then I went on. “There was a drunk had a poodle and he took him
everywhere with him from bar to bar. And you know why? Was it
devotion? It was not devotion. He took that poodle everywhere just
so he could spit on him and not get the floor dirty. Well, you were
the Boss’s poodle. And you liked it. You liked to be spit on. You
weren’t human. You weren’t real. That’s what I thought. But I was
wrong, Tiny. Somewhere down in you there was something made
you human. You resented being spit on. Even for money.”

I got up, with my half-empty glass in my hand.

“And now, Tiny,” I said, “that I know you are real, I sort of feel
sorry for you. You are a funny old fat man, Tiny, with your heart
getting bad and your liver nigh gone and sweat running doxvn your

439

face and a mean worry on your mind and a great blackness like
water rising in a cellar inside you and I almost feel sorry for you but
if you say a ivord I might stop feeling sorry for you. So now I’m
going to drink up your whisky and spit in the glass and go.’’

So I drank off the 'whisky, dropped the glass on the floor (on the
thick rug it didn’t break), and started for the door. I had almost got
there, when I heard a cioak from the couch. I looked around.

“It~” he croaked, '*it won’t stand in a court.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “it won’t. But you still got plenty
ta worry about.”

I opened the door and walked through and left the door open
behind me and walked down the long hall under the great, glitter-
ing chandelier, and walked out into the brisk night.

I took a deep drag of fresh air and looked up through the trees at
the distinct stars. I felt like a million. I had sure-God brought off
that scene. I had hit him where he lived. I was full of beans. I had
fire in my belly. I was a hero. I was St. George and the dragon, I
was Edwin Booth bowing beyond the gaslights, I was Jesus Christ
■with the horsewhip in the temple.

I was the stuff.

And all at once under the stars I was like a man who has done
himself the best from soup to nuts and a Corona Corona and feels
like a virtuous million and all at once there isn’t anything but the
yellow, acid taste which has crawled up to the back of the mouth
from the old, tired stomach.

Three days later I got the registered letter from Sadie Burke. It
read:

Dear Jack:

Just so you won’t think I am going to welch on what I said I would do
I am enclosing the statement I said I would make. I have got it witnessed
and notarized and nailed do'wn as tight as you can nail anything down
and you can do anything with it you want for it is yours. I mean this.
It is your baby, just like I said.

As for me I am getting out of here. I don’t mean just getting out of this
cross benveen an old folks’ home and a booby-hatch, but out of diis town
and out of this state. I can’t stand it round here and I’m pulling out. I’ll
be gone a long way and I’ll be gone a long time and maybe somewhere
the climate will be better. But my cousin (Mrs. Sill Larkin, 2531 Rousseau
Ave.) who is the nearest thing to a relative I got will have some kind of
address for me sometime, and if you ever want to contact me just write
me care of her. Wherever I am I’ll do what you say. I’ll come if you say
come. I don't want you thinking I am going to welch. I don't care who
knows anything. I’ll do anything you say about that piece of business.

440

But if you take my advice about that piece of business you will let it
drop. This is not because I love Duff)^ I hope you tviU give him. an earful
and let him wet his pants. But my advice is to let it drop. First, )ou can-
not do anything in law. Second, if you use it politically the best you can
get will be to keep Duffy from being re-elected, and you know as well as
I do he will never get nominated even. The boys will never nominate him
for they know he is a dummy even by their standards. He was just some-
thing the Boss kept around. Springing this stuff won't hurt the gang any.
It will just give them an excuse to get rid of Duff)^ If you want to get the
gang you got to let them dig their own grave like they sure will now the
Boss is gone. But third, it is sure going to be rough on that Stanton dame
if you break this stuff. She may be so noble and high-toned like you said
that she will want you to do it, but you are a sap if you do. She has maybe
had plenty to put up wdth already in her way, and }Ou would be a sap to
crucify her just because you got some high-falutmg idea you are an Eagle
Scout and she is Joan of Arc, You would be a sap to tell her even. Unless
you are so blabber mouthed you have done it already. Like you maybe
have. I am not going on to say she is my best friend but she has had her
troubles like I said and you might give her a break.

Remember I am not weldiing. I am just giving you my advice.

Keep your tail over the dashboard.

Sincerely yours,

Sadie Burke

I read through Sadie^s statement. It said everything there was to
say, and each page was signed and witnessed. Then I folded it up.
It was no good to me. Not because of the advice which Sadie had
given me. Her letter made sense, all right That is, the part about
Duffy and the gang. But something had happened. To hell with
them all, I thought. I was sick of it all.

I looked down at the letter again. So Sadie had called me an
Eagle Scout. But that wasn’t news, either. I had called myself worse
names than that the night after I had seen Duffy and was walking
down the street under the stars. But it touched the sore place and
made it throb. It throbbed the worse because I knew that it wasn’t
a secret sore place. Sadie had known about it. She had seen through
me. She had read me like a book.

There was only one wry piece of consolation in the thought. At
least, I had not had to wait for her to read me. I had read myself
to myself that night walking down the street, full of beans and
being an Eagle Scout, when the yellow, acid taste had all at once
crawled up to the back of my mouth.

What had I read? I had read this: When I found out about
Duffy’s killing the Boss and Adam I had felt clean and pure, and
when I kicj^ed Duffy around I felt like a million because I thought

44i

it let me out. Duffy was the villain and I was the avenging hero. I
had kicked Duffy around and my head was big as a balloon with
grandeur. Then all at once something happened and the yellow
taste was in the back of my mouth.

This happened: I suddenly asked myself why Duffy had been so
sure I would work for him. And suddenly I saw the eyes of the little
squirt-face newspaperman at the cemetery gate on me, and all the
eyes that had looked at me that way, and suddenly I knew that I
had tried to make Duffy into a scapegoat for me and to set myself
off from Duffy, and my million-dollar meal of heroism backfired
that yellow taste into my gullet and I felt caught and tangled and
mired and stuck like an ox in a bog and a cat in flypaper. It wasn’t
simply that I again saw myself as party to that conspiracy with Anne
Stanton which had committed Willie Stark and Adam Stanton to
each other and to their death. It was more than that. It was as
though I were caught in a more monstrous conspiracy whose mean-
ing I could not fathom. It was as though the scene through which I
had just lived had been a monstrous and comic miming for ends I
could not conceive and for an audience I could not see but which
I knew was leering from the shadow. It was as though in the midst
of the scene Tiny Duffy had slowly and like a brother winked at me
whh his oyster eye and I had known he knew the nightmare truth,
which was that we were twins bound together more intimately and
disastrously than the poor freaks of the midway who are bound by
the common stitch of flesh and gristle and the seepage of blood. We
were bound together forever and I could never hate him without
hating myself or love myself without loving him. We were bound
together under the unwinking eye of Eternity and by the Holy
Grace of the Great Twitch whom we must ail adore.

And I heaved and writhed like the ox or the cat, and the acid
burned my gullet and that was all there was to it and I hated every-
thing and everybody and myself and Tiny Duffy and Willie Stark
and Adam Stanton. To hell with them ail, I said impartially under
the stars. They all looked alike to me then. And I looked like them.

That was the way it was for quite a while.

I did not go back to the Landing. I did not want to see Anne
Stanton. I did not even open a letter she wrote me. It lay on my
bureau where I saw it every morning. I did not want to see anybody
I knew. I hung around town and sat in my room or sat in bars
which I had never frequented and sat in movies in the front row,
where I could admire the enormous and distorted shadows which
gesticulated and struck or clutched or clung and uttered assevera-
tions which reminded you of everything which you had ever remem-

442

bered. And I sat for hours in the newspaper room of the public
library, the place which like railway stations and missions and pub-
lic latrines is where the catarrhal old men and bums go and where
they sit to thumb the papers which tell about the world in which
they live for a certain number of years or to sit and wheeze and
stare while the gray rain slides down the big wdndowpanes above
them.

It was in the newspaper room of the library that I saw Sugar-Boy.
It was such an improbable place to encounter him that at first I
scarcely accepted the evidence of my e}es. But there he was. The
rather largish head hung forward as though its w^eight were too
much for the little stem of a neck, and I could see how thin and
pink like a baby’s the skin was over the skull in the areas where the
hair had prematurely gone. His short arms in sleeves of wrinkled
blue serge lay symmetrically out before him on the table, like a
brace of stuffed sacks of country sausage laid on a butcher’s counter.
The pale, chubby hands curled innocently on the varnished yellow
oak of the table. He was looking at a picture magazine.

Then one of the hands, the right hand, with the quick, flickering
motion which I remembered, dropped below the level of the table—
to the side pocket of his coat, I presumed— and returned with a cube
of sugar which he popped into his mouth. The flickering motion of
the hand reminded me, and I wondered if he was still carrying a
gun. I looked at the left side toward the shoulder, but I couldn’t
tell. Sugar-Boy’s blue serge coat was always a size too big for him.

It was Sugar-Boy all right, and I didn’t want to see him. If he
should raise his head he would look right at me. Now while he was
sunk in the picture magazine I tried for the door. I edged over to
one side easy and was almost past his natural area of vision when
he lifted his head and our eyes met. He rose from the chair and
came toward me.

I gave an ambiguous nod which might have served merely for
recognition, a rather chilly and discouraging recognition, or for a
signal to follow me out to the hall where we could talk. He took the
latter interpretation, and followed me. I didn’t wait just outside the
door, but moved some distance across the hall to the steps (those
newspaper rooms in public libraries are always in a half basement,
next to the men’s latrine) which led up to the main lobby. Maybe
he would read something into that extra distance. But he didn’t.
He came padding over to me, with his blue serge trousers bagging
down low off his can and the tops crumpling over his black, soft-
leather box-toed shoes.

443

^'How-how-how— ” he began, and the face began its pained, apolo-
getic contortions, and the spit flew.

‘I'm making out," I said. “How're you making out?”

“Aw-aw-aw-right.”

We stood tliere in the dingy, dimly lit basement hall of the public
library with the cigarette butts on the cement floor around us and
the door of the men’s latrine behind us and the air smelling of dry
paper and dust and disinfectant. It w’as eleven- thirty in the morning
and outside the gray sky dripped steadily like a sogged old awning.
We look at each other. Each one knew the other was there out of
the rain because he had no other place to go.

He shuffled his feet on the floor, looked down at the floor, then
back up at me. “I-I-I could-a had a-a-a-a job,” he declared earnestly.

“Sure,” I said, without much interest.

“I-I-I-I just didn’t wa-wa-wa-want one. Not yet,” he said. “I didn’t
fee-fee-feel like no job yet.”

“Sure,” I repeated.

“I-I-I got me some mo-mo-money saved up,” he said apolo-
getically.

“Sure.”

He looked searchingly at me. “Y-y-y-you got a job?” he asked.

I shook my head, but was about to say in my defense what he had
just said, that I could have had one if I had wanted it. I could have
been sitting up in a nice office next door to Tiny DufEy’s office with
my feet on a mahogany desk. If I had wanted. And as that crossed
my mind, with the momentary flicker of weary self-irony, I suddenly
saw like a blaze of lightning and a clap of thunder what the Lord
had put before me. Duffy, I thought, Duffy,

And there was Sugar-Boy standing before me.

“Listen,” I said, and leaned toward him in the empty hall, “listen,
do you know who killed the Boss?”

The biggish head rolled a little to one side on the little stem of a
neck as he looked up at me and the face began its painful twitching.
“Yeah,” he said, “yeah— the son-of-a-bi-bi-bitch and I-I-I shot him.”

“Yeah,” I said, “you shot Stanton—” and I thought with an in-
stantaneous stab of Adam Stanton alive a long time back and now
dead, and I, hated the malformed, sad little creature before me—
“yeah, you shot him.”

The head rolled slightly and tiredly on the neck, and he repeated,
“I-I-I shot him.”

“But suppose you don’t know,” I said, leaning, “suppose there
was somebody behind Stanton, somebody who framed him to do it/’

444

I let that sink in, and watched his face twitch while no sound
came.

“Suppose/* I continued, “suppose I could tell you who— suppose
I could prove it— what would you do?*’

Suddenly his face wasn’t twitching. It was smooth as a baby’s and
peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes
momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.

“What would you do?” I demanded.

“I'd kill the son-of-a-bitch,” he said. And he had not stuttered at
all.

“They’d hang you,” I said.

“I’d k-k-k-kill him. They couldn’t h-h-h-hang me before I killed
him.”

“Remember,” I whispered, leaning closer, “they’d hang you.”

He stared up at me, prying into my face. “Who-who-who is it?”

“They’d hang you. Are you sure you’d kill him?”

“Who-who-who— ” he began. Then he clutched my coat. “Y-y-you
know—” he said, “y-y-you know something you ain’t t-t-t-telling me.”

I could tell him. I could say to him, meet me here at three o’clock,
I want to show you something. I could bring the stuff from Sadie,
the stuff that lay up in my room in a desk, and he would take one
look. One look. It would be like touching a trigger.

His hands w’^ere clutching and clawing at my coat. “T-t-tell me,”
he was saying.

One look. It was perfect. I could meet him here in the afternoon.
We could step into the latrine and he could take one look, and I
would go home and burn the stuff. Hell, why burn it? What had I
done? I even warned the little bugger they’d hang him. They had
nothing on me.

He was clawing at me, importunately and feebly, saying, “T-t-tell
me, you better t-t-tell me now.”

It would be too easy. It was perfect. And the perfect mathemati-
cal irony of it— the perfect duplication of what Duffy had done—
struck me, and I felt like laughing out loud. “Listen here,” I said
to Sugar-Boy. “Stop clawing on me and listen here and 111—”

He stopped clawing and stood meekly before me.

He would do it, I knew he would do it. And it was such a Joke on
Duffy I almost laughed out loud. And as the name of Duffy flashed
across my mind I saw Duffy’s face, large and lunar and sebac^us,
nodding at me as at the covert and brotherly appreciation of a Joke,
and even as I opened my lips to speak the syllables of his name, he
winked. He winked right at me like a brother.

I stood there stock-still.

445

Sugar-Boy's face began to twitch again. He was going to ask
again. I stared down at him. “I was kidding/’ I said.

There was absolute blankness on his face, and then an absolute
murderousness. There wasn't any flare of fury. It was a cold and
innocent and murderous certainty. It was as though his face had
suddenly frozen in a split second in that certainty, and it looked
like the face of a man who had been trapped and had died in the
snow long ago, centuries ago—back in the ice age, perhaps~and the
glacier brings it down all those centuries, inch by inch, and sud-
denly, with its primitive purity and lethal innocence, it stares at
you through the last preserving glaze of ice.

I stood there for what seemed forever. I couldn't move. I was sure
1 was a goner.

Then tlie ice face wasn’t there. It was just Sugar-Boy's face on a
head too big for the neck, and it was saying, ‘‘I-l-I durn near
d-d-done it.”

I ran my tongue over my dry lips. “I know it,” I said.

“Y-y-you oughtn’t d-d-d-done me that way,” he said in humble
complaint.

”I'm sorry.”

”y-y-you know h-h-how I feel, and y-y-you oughtn’t d-d-done me
like that.”

know how you feel,” I said. ”And I'm sorry. I really am.”

”F-f-fergit it,” he said. He stood there, seeming smaller than be-
fore, slumped and forlorn as though he were a doll that had lost
some of its sawdust.

I studied him. Then I said, as much to myself as to him, I sup-
pose, ”You really would have done it.”

”It w-w-was the B-B-Boss,” he said.

“Even if they’d hang you.”

“They w-w-wasn't n-n-nobody like the B-B-Boss. And they
k-k-killed him. They h-h-had to go and k-k-kill him.”

He shuffled his feet on the cement floor and looked down at
them. “He could t-t-talk so good,” he half-mumbled with his stutter-
ing. “The B-B-Boss could. Couldn’t nobody t-t-talk like him. When
he m-m-made a speech and ev-ev-everybody y-y-yelled, it looked
I-l-like something was gonna b-b-bust inside y-y-you.” He touched
his chest with his hand to indicate where something looked like it
might bust inside you. Then he looked questioningly at me.

“Sure,” I agreed, “he was a great talker.”

We stood there for a half minute more without anything to say
to each other. He looked at me and then down at his feet Then
back at me, and said, “W-w-well, I reckon I'll b-b-be getting on.”

446

He put out one of his hands to me and I took it and gave it a
shake.

'‘Well, good luck/* I said.

And he went up the stairs, bending his knees excessively for the
stairs, for his legs were stumpy. When he used to drive the big black
Cadillac he always had a couple of flat cushions~the kind you take
with you on picnics or in a canoe-to prop behind him so he could
properly work the clutch and brake pedals.

So that was the last I saw of Sugar-Boy. He had been born over in
Irish Town. He had been the runt the big boys shoved around in
the vacant lot. They had played baseball, but he hadn't been good
enough to play. ‘'Hey, Sawed-Off,** they'd say, “go git me that bat.”
Or, “Hey, Sawed-Off, go git me a coke.** And he had gone to get the
bat or the coke. Or they'd say, “Aw, dry up, Mush-Mouth, write me
a letter.” And he had dried up. But somehow, sometime, he had
learned what he could do. Those stubby arms could flip the steering
wheel of a car as clean as a bee martin whips round the corner of a
barn. Those pale-blue eyes, which didn't have any depth, could
look down the barrel of a .38 and see, really see for one frozen and
apocalyptic instant, what was over yonder. So he had found himself
one day in the big black Cadillac with a couple of tons of expensive
machinery pulsing under his fingers and the blue-steel .38 riding in
the dark under his left armpit like a tumor. And the Boss was by
his side, who could talk so good.

“Well, good luck,” I had said to him, but I knew what his luck
would be. Some morning I would pick up the paper and see that a
certain Robert (or was it Roger?) O'Sheean had been killed in an
automobile crash. Or had been shot to death by unidentified assail-
ants while he sat in a car in the shadow outside the Love-Me-and-
Leave-Me roadhouse and gambling hell operated by his employer.
Or had that morning walked unassisted to the scaffold as a result of
having been quicker on the draw than a policeman named, no
doubt, Murphy. Or perhaps that was romantic. Perhaps he would
live forever and outlive everything and his nerve would go (likker,
dope, or Just plain time) and he would sit, morning after morning
while the gray winter rain sluiced down the high windows, in the
newspaper room of the public library, a scrawny bald little old man
in greasy, tattered clothes bent over a picture magazine.

So perhaps I hadn’t done Sugar-Boy any favor after all in not
telling him about Duffy and the Boss and allowing him to whang
straight to his mark and be finished like a bullet when it strikes in.
Perhaps I had robbed Sugar-Boy of the one thing which he had
earned out of the years he had lived and which was truly himself*

447

and everything else to come after, no matter what it w^as, would
be waste and accident and the sour and stinking curdle of truth like
what you find in the half-full bottle of milk you had left in the ice-
box when you went away for )our six- week vacation.

Or perhaps Sugar-Boy had had something of which he could
never be robbed.

I stood there in the hall after Sugar-Boy had gone, breathing the
odor of old papers and disinfectant, and turning these thoughts
over in my mind. Then I went back into the newspaper room and
sat down and bent over a picture magazine.

It was February when I saw Sugar-Boy in the library. I continued
with the way of life which I had adopted, still hugging the aimless-
ness and the anonymity about me like a blanket. But there was a
difference now, in my own mind if not in the circumstances of my
life. And in the end, months later, in May, in fact, the difference
which my meeting with Sugar-Boy had made in my mind sent me
to see Lucy Stark. Now, at least, I can see that such was the case.

I telephoned her out at the farm where she was still staying. She
sounded all right on the phone. And she asked me to come out.

So I was back in the parlor in the little white house, among the
black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, looking down at
the flowers in the carpet. Nothing had changed in that room for a
long time, or would change for a long time. But Lucy had changed
a little. She was fleshier now, with a more positive gray in her hair.
She was more like the woman the house had reminded me of the
first time I had seen it— a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a
clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes,
sitting in her rocker on the porch, with her hands folded across her
stomach to take a little ease now the day's work is done and the
menfolks are still in the fields and it’s not yet time to think about
supper or strain the evening milk. She wasn’t that woman yet, but
give her six or seven more years and she would be.

I sat there with my eyes on a flower in the carpet, or I looked up
at her and then again at the flower, and her own glance strayed
about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of
looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act. We were say-
ing things to each other all the while, but they were strained and
difficult things, completely empty.

You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a
wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the
glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a
stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with

448

whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied. Or you share some
intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep
communion. Then afterward you are sure that w^hen you meet
again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant
stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend
will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something
happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the
communion. You remember the individual words from the old
language you spoke together, but you have forgotten the grammar.
You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing
any more. So there you are.

So there we sat for a 'while, and the minutes sifted and wavered
down around us, one by one, like leaves dropping in still autumn
air. Then, after a space of silence, she excused herself and I was left
alone to w^'atch the leaves drift down.

But she came back, carrying now a tray on which was a pitcher
of iced tea, two glasses with sprigs of mint stuck in them, and a
large devil’s-food cake. That is what they give you in the country
in a little white house like that when you make a visit, iced tea and
devil’s-food cake. She had made the cake that morning, no doubt, in
preparation for my visit.

Well, eating the cake would be something to do. Nobody expects
you to talk with your mouth full of cake.

In the end, however, she said something. Perhaps having the cake
on the table beside her, seeing somebody eat her cake, which she
knew was a good cake, as people had sat on Sunday afternoons and
eaten cake in that room for years, made it possible for her to say
something.

She said, ‘Tou knew Tom was dead.”

She said it perfectly matter-of-factly, and that was a comfort.

“Yes,” I replied, “I knew it.”

I had seen it in the paper, back in February. I hadn’t gone to the
funeral. I figured I had been to enough funerals. And I hadn’t 'writ-
ten her a letter. I couldn’t very well write a letter and say I w^as
sorry, and I couldn’t very well 'write her a letter of congratulations.

“It was pneumonia,” she said.

I remembered Adam’s saying that that was wh^t often got such
cases.

“He died very quickly,” she continued. “Just three days.”

“Yes,” I said.

She was silent for a moment, then said, “I am resigned now* I am
resigned to it all now, Jack. A time comes when you think you cam

449

not bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it.
I am resigned now, by God’s help/'

I didn’t make any ans'wer.

“Then after I was resigned, God gave me something so I could
live."

I murmured something inarticulate.

She rose abruptly from her chair, and thinking I was being dis-
missed, I rose, too, clumsily, and started to say something by way of
a good-bye. I was ready and anxious to go. I had been a fool to come.
But she reached to touch my sleeve, and said, “I want to show you
something." She moved away, toward the door. “Come with me,”
she said.

I followed her into the little hall, down it, and into a back room.
She went across the room briskly. I didn’t take it in at first, but
there by the window was a crib and in the crib was a baby.

She was standing on the far side of the crib looking across at me
at the instant when I really saw what was there. I guess my face was
a study. Anyway, she said, “It’s Tom’s baby. It’s my little grand-
baby. It’s Tom’s baby.”

She leaned over the crib, touching the baby here and there the
way women do. Then she picked it up, holding it up with one hand
behind its head to prop the head. She joggled it slightly and looked
directly in its face. The baby's mouth opened in a yawn, and its
eyes squinched and unsquinched, and then with the joggling and
clucking it was getting it gave a moist and pink and toothless smile,
like an advertisement. Lucy Stark’s face had exactly the kind of ex-
pression on it which you would expect, and that expression said
everything there was to say on the subject in hand.

She came around the crib, holding the baby up for my inspection,

“It’s a pretty baby,” I said, and put out a forefinger for the baby
to clutch, the way you are supposed to do.

“It looks like Tom,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”

Then before I could get an answer ready that wouldn’t be too
horrendous a lie, she went on, “But that’s silly to ask you. You
wouldn't know. I mean he looks like Tom when he was a baby.”
She paused to inspect the baby again. “It looks like Tom,” she said,
more to herself than to me. Then she looked directly at me. “I know
it’s Tom’s,” she declared fiercely to me, ”it’s got to be Tom’s, it
looks like him.”

I looked critically at the baby, and nodded. “It favors him, all
right,” I agreed.

“To think,” she said, “there was a time I prayed to God it wasn’t
Tom’s baby. So an injustice wouldn’t be Tom’s.” The baby bounced

450

a little in her arms. It was a husky, good-looking baby, all right. She
gave the baby an encouraging jiggle, and then looked back at me.
“And now,*' she continued, “I have prayed to God that it is Tom's.
And I know now.”

I nodded.

“I knew in my heart,” she said. “And then, do you think that
poor girl— the mother— would have given it to me if she hadn't
knowm it was Tom’s? No matter what that girl did— even what they
said— don't you think a mother would know? She would just know.”

“Yes,” I said.

“But I knew, too. In my heart. So I wrote her a letter. I went to
see her, I saw the baby. Oh, I knew even more then. As soon as I
saw him and held him. I persuaded her to let me adopt him.”

“You've got it fixed for a legal adoption?” I asked. “So she
won’t—” I stopped before I could say, “be bleeding you for years.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, apparently not reading my mind. “I got a
law}^er to go see her and fix everything. I gave her some money, too.
The poor girl wanted to go to California and get away. Willie
didn’t leave much money— he spent almost everything he made—
but I gave her what I could. I gave her six thousand dollars.”

So Sibyl had made a good thing out of it after all, I reflected.

“Don't you want to hold him?” Lucy asked me in an access of
generosity, thrusting out the expensive baby in my direction.

“Sure,” I said, and took him. I hefted him, while I carefully tried
to keep him from failing apart. “How much does he weigh?” I
asked, and suddenly realized that I had the tone of a man about to
buy something.

“Fifteen pounds and three ounces,” she answered promptly; and
added, “that is very good for three months.”

“Sure,” I said, “that’s a lot.”

She relieved me of the baby, gave him a sort of quick snuggle to
her bosom, bending her head down so her face was against the
baby’s head, and then replaced him in the crib.

“What's his name?” I asked.

She straightened up and came around to my side of the crib. “At
first,” she said, “I thought I'd name him for Tom. I thought that
for quite a while. Then it came to me. I would name him for Willie.
His name is Willie— Willie Stark.”

She led the way out into the little hall again. We walked up
toward the table where my hat lay. Then she turned around and
scrutinized my face as though the light weren't very good in the
hall.

“You know/' she said, “I named him for Willie because—”

451

She wau still scrutinizing my face.

“—because,*' she continued, “because 'IVillie was a great man.*'

I nodded, I suppose.

“Oh, I know he made mistakes," she said, and lifted up her chin
as though facing something, “bad mistakes. Maybe he did bad
things, like they say. But inside— in here, deep down—" and she laid
her hand to her bosom— “he was a great man."

She wasn’t bothering wuth my face any more, with trying to read
it. For the moment, she wasn't bothering with me. I might as well
not have been there.

“He w’as a great man," she affirmed again, in a voice nearly a
whisper. Then she looked again at me, calmly. “You see, Jack," she
said, “I have to believe that."

Yes, Lucy, you have to believe that. You have to believe that to
live. I know that you must believe that. And I would not have you
believe otherwise. It must be that way, and I understand the fact.
For you see, Lucy, I must believe that, too. I must believe that
Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not
the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill
a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness
and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then
there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps
he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them
together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must
believe that.

Because I came to believe that, I came back to Burden’s Landing.
I did not come to believe it at the moment when I watched Sugar-
Boy mount the stairs from the basement hall of the public library
or when Lucy Stark stood before me in the hall of the little paint-
peeling white house in the country. But because of those things—
and of all the other things which had happened— I came, in the
end, to believe that. And believing that Willie Stark was a great
man, I could think better of all other people, and of myself. At the
same time that I could more surely condemn myself.

I came back to Burden’s Landing in early summer, at the request
of my mother. She telephoned me one night and said, “Son, I want
you to come here. As soon as you can. Can you come tomorrow?"

When I asked her what she wanted, for I still did not want to go
back, she refused to answer me directly. She said she would tell me
when I came.

So I went.

She was waiting for me on the gallery when I drove up late the

452

next afternoon. \Ve went around to the screened side galler) and
had a drink. She wasn’t talking much, and I didn’t rush her.

When by near seven o’clock the Young Executive hadn’t turned
up, I asked her was he coming to dinner.

She shook her head. “Where is he?’’ I asked.

She turned her empty glass m her hand, lightly clinking the ice
left there. Then she said, “I don’t know.”

“On a trip?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered, clinking the ice. Then she turned to me.
“He has been gone five days,” she said. “He won’t come back until
I have gone. You see-” she set the glass down on the table beside
her with an air of finality— “I am leaving him.”

“Well,” I breathed, “I’m damned.”

She continued to look at me, as though expecting something.
What, I didn’t know.

“Well, I’m damned,” I said, still fumbling with the fact which
she had presented to me.

“Are you surprised?” she asked me, leaning a little toward me in
her chair.

“Sure, I’m surprised.”

She examined me intently, and I could detect a curious shifting
and shading of feelings on her face, too evanescent and ambiguous
for definition.

“Sure, I’m surprised,” I repeated.

“Oh,” she said, and sank back in her chair, sinking back like
somebody who has fallen into deep water and clutches for a rope
and seizes it and hangs on a moment and loses the grip and tries
again and doesn’t make it and knows it’s no use to try again. There
wasn’t anything ambiguous now about her face. It was like what
I said. She had missed her grip.

She turned her face away from me, out toward the bay, as though
she didn’t want me to see what was on it. Then she said, “I thought
—I thought maybe you wouldn’t be surprised.”

I couldn’t tell her why I or anybody else would be surprised. I
couldn’t tell her that when a woman as old as she was getting to be
had her hooks in a man not much more than forty years old and
not wind-broke it was surprising if she didn’t hang on. Even if the
woman had money and the man was as big a horse’s-ass as the
Young Executive. I couldn’t tell her that, and so I didn’t say any-
thing.

She kept on looking out to the bay. “I thought,” she said, hesi-
tated, and resumed, “I thought maybe you’d understand why.
Jack”

453

“Well, I don't,” I replied.

She held oS awhile, then began again. “It happened last year. I
knew when it happened.—Oh, I knew it would be like this.”

“^V'hen what happened?”

“When you— w^hen )ou— ” Then she stopped, and corrected what
she had been about to say. “When Monty— died.”

Then she swung back toward me and on her face was a kind of
wild appeal. She was making another grab for that rope. “Oh,
Jack,” she said, “Jack, it was Monty— don't you see?— it was Monty.”

I reckoned that I saw, and I said so. I remembered the silvery,
pure scream which had jerked me out into the hall that afternoon
of Judge Irwnn’s death, and the face of my mother as she lay on the
bed later with the knowledge sinking into her.

“It W’as Monty,” she was saying. “It was always Monty. I didn't
really know it. There hadn’t been— been anything between us for a
long time. But it was alw^ays Monty. I knew it when he was dead.
I didn't want to know it but I knew it. And I couldn't go on. There
came a time I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t.”

She rose abruptly from her chair, like something jerked up by a
string.

“I couldn't,” she said. “Because everything was a mess. Everything
had always been a mess.” Her hands twisted and tore the handker-
chief she held before her at the level of her waist. “Oh, Jack,” she
cried out, “it had always been a mess.”

She flung down the shredded handkerchief and ran off the gallery.
I heard the sound of her heels on the floor inside, but it wasn't the
old bright, spirited tattoo. It was a kind of desperate, slovenly clat-
ter, suddenly muted on the rug.

I waited on the gallery for a while. Then I went back to the
kitchen. “My mother isn't feeling very well,” I told the cook. “You
or Jo-Belle might go up a little later and see if she will take some
broth and egg or something like that.”

Then I went back into the dining room and sat down in the can^
dlelight and they brought me the food and I ate some of it.

After dinner Jo-Belle came to tell me that she had carried a tray
up to my mother's room but she wouldn't take it. She hadn't even
opened the door at the knock. She had just called to say she didn't
want anything.

I sat on the gallery a long time while the sounds died out back in
the kitchen. Then the light went out back there. The rectangle of
green in the middle of blackness where the light of the window fell
on the grass was suddenly black, too.

After a while I went upstairs and stood outside the door of my

454

mother’s room. Once or twice I almost knocked to go in. But I de-
cided that even if I went in, there wouldn’t be anything to say.
There isn’t ever anything to say to somebody who has found out the
truth about himself, whether it is good or bad.

So I went back down and stood in the garden among the black
magnolia trees and the myrtles, and thought how by killing my
father I had saved my mother’s soul. Then I thought how majbe I
had saved my father’s soul, too. Both of them had found out what
they needed to know to be saved. Then I thought how all knowl-
edge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by blood. Maybe that
is the only way you can tell that a certain piece of knowledge is
worth anything: it has cost some blood.

My mother left the next day. She was going to Reno. I drove her
down to the station, and arranged all her nice, slick matched bags
and valises and cases and hatboxes in a nice row on the cement of
the platform to wait for the train. The day was hot and bright, and
the cement was hot and gritty under our feet as we stood there in
that vacuity which belongs to the period just before parting at a
railway station.

We stood there quite a while, looking up the track for the first
smudge of smoke on the heat-tingling horizon beyond the tide flats
and the clumps of pines. Then my mother suddenly said, “Jack, I
want to tell you something.”

“Yes?”

“I am letting Theodore have the house,”

That took me so by surprise I couldn’t say anything. I thought
of all the years she had been cramming the place with furniture
and silver and glass till it was a museum and she was God’s gift to
the antique dealers of New Orleans, New York, and London. I v/as
surprised anything could pry her loose from it.

“You see,” she said, hurrying on in the tone of explanation, mis-
reading my silence, “it isn’t really Theodore’s fault and you know
how crazy he is about the place and about living on the Row and
all that. And I didn’t think you’d want it You see—I thought— I
thought you had Monty’s place and if you ever lived at the Landing
you’d prefer that because—because— ”

“Because he was my father,” I finished for her, a little grimly.

“Yes,” she said, simply, “Because he w’-as your father. So I decided
to-”

“Damn it,” I burst out, “it is your house and you can do whatever
you want to with it. I wouldn’t have it. As soon as I get my bag out
of there this afternoon 111 never set foot in it again, and that is a

455

fact. I don't want it and I don't care what you do with it or wdth
your money. I don’t want that either. I’ve always told you that.”

“There ivon’t be any too much money to worry about,” she said.
“You know w^hat the last six or seven years have been like.”

“You aren’t broke?” I asked. “Look here, if you’re broke, I’ll—”

“I’m not broke,” she said. “I’ll have enough to get on with. If I
go somewhere quiet and am careful. At first I thought I might go
to Europe, then I—”

“You better stay out of Europe,” I said. “All hell is going to break
loose over there and not long either.”

“Oh, I’m not going. I’m going to some quiet, cheap place. I don’t
know where. I’ll have to think.”

“Weil,” I said, “don’t worry about me and the house. You can be
plenty sure I’ll never set foot in it again.”

She looked up the tracks, east, where there wasn’t any smoke yet
beyond the pines and the tidelands. She mused for a couple of
minutes on the emptiness off there. Then said, as though just pick-
ing up my own words. “I ought never set foot in it. I married and I
came to it and he was a good man. But I ought to have stayed where
I was. I ought never come.”

I couldn’t very well argue that point with her one way or the
other, and so I kept quiet

But as she stood there in the silence, she seemed to be arguing it
with herself, for suddenly she lifted up her head and looked straight
at me and said, “Well, I did it. And now I know.” And she squared
her trim shoulders under her trim blue linen suit and held her face
up in the old way like it was a damned expensive present she was
making to the world and the world had better appreciate it.

Well, she knew now. As she stood there on the hot cement in the
dazzle, she seemed to be musing on what she knew.

But it was on what she didn’t know. For after a while she turned
to me and said, “Son, tell me something.”

“What?”

“It’s something I’ve got to know, Son.”

“What is it?”

“When— when it happened— when you went to see Monty—”

That was it. I knew that was it. And in the midst of the dazzle
and the heat shimmering off the cement, I was cold as ice and my
nerves crawled cold inside me.

“—did he— was there—” she was looking away from me.

“You mean,” I said, “had he got into a jam and had to shoot him-
self? Is that it?”

456

She nodded, then looked straight at me and waited for what was
coming.

I looked into her face and studied it. The light wasn’t any too
kind to it. Light would never be kind to it again. But she held it up
and looked straight at me and waited.

“No,” I said, “he wasn’t in any jam. We had a little argument
about politics. Nothing serious. But he talked about his health.
About feeling bad. That was it. He said good-bye to me. I can see
now he meant it as the real thing. That was all.”

She sagged a little. She didn’t have to brace up so stiff any longer.

“Is that tlie truth?” she demanded.

“Yes,” I said. “I swear to God it is.”

“Oh,” she said softly and let her breath escape in an almost
soundless sigh.

So we waited again. There wasn’t anything else to say. She had
finally, at the last minute, asked what she had been wanting to ask
and had been afraid to ask all the time.

Then, after a while, there was the smoke on the horizon. Then
we could see, far off, the black smoke moving toward us along the
edge of the bright water. Then with the great grinding and tramp-
ing and hissing and the wreaths of steam, the engine had pulled
past us to a stop- A white-coated porter began to gather up the nice
matched bags and boxes.

My mother turned to me and took me by the arm. “Good-bye,
Son,” she said.

“Good-bye,” I said.

She stepped toward me and I put my arm around her.

“Write to me, Son,” she said. “Write to me. You are all I’ve got.”

I nodded. “Let me know how you make out,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “yes.”

Then I kissed her good-bye, and as I did so I saw die conductor
who was beyond her look at his watch and flick it into his pocket
with that contemptuous motion a conductor on a crack train has
when he is getting ready to wind up the ninety-second stop at a hick
town. I knew he was that very instant going to call, “All aboard!”
But it seemed a long time coming. It was like looking at a man
across a wide valley and seeing the puff of smoke from his gun and
then waiting God knows how long for the tiny report, or like seeing
the lightning way off and waiting for the thunder. I stood there
with my arm around my mother’s shoulder and her cheek against
mine (her cheek was wet, I discovered) and waited for the conductor
to call, “All aboard!”

Then it came, and she stepped back from me and mounted the

457

steps and turned to wave as the train drew away and the portei
slammed the vestibule door.

I looked after the dwindling train that was carrying my mother
away until it was nothing but the smudge of smoke to the west, and
thought how I had lied to her. Well, I had given that lie to her as
a going-away present. Or a kind of wedding present, I thought.

Then I thought how ma)be I had lied just to cover up myself.

'‘Damn it,’' I said out loud, savagely, "it wasn’t for me, it wasn’t.”

And that was true. It was really true.

I had given my mother a present, which was a lie. But in return
she had given me a present, too, which was a truth. She gave me a
new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture
of the world. Or rather, that new picture of herself filled in the
blank space which was perhaps the center of the new picture of the
world which had been given to me by many people, by Sadie Burke,
Lucy Stark, Willie Stark, Sugar-Boy, Adam Stanton. And that meant
that my mother gave me back the past. I could now accept the past
which I had before felt was tainted and horrible. I could accept the
past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and
with myself.

For years I had condemned her as a woman without heart, who
loved merely power over men and the momentary satisfaction to
vanity or flesh which they could give her, who lived in a strange
loveless oscillation between calculation and instinct. And my
mother, realizing a condemnation of her, but without, perhaps,
realizing its nature, had done everything she could to hold me and
to throttle the condemnation. What she could do to me was to use
the force which she was able to use on other men. I resisted and re-
sented this but I wanted to be loved by her and at the same time I
was drawn by the force, for she was a vital and beautiful woman
by whom I was drawn and by whom I was repelled, whom I con-
demned and of whom I was proud. But the change came.

The first hint was in the wild, silvery scream which filled the
house when the word of Judge Irwin’s death was received. That
scream rang in my ears for many months, but it had faded away,
lost in the past and the corruption of the past, by the time she
called me back to Burden’s Landing to tell me that she was going
to go away. Then I knew that she was telling the truth. And I felt
at peace with her and with myself.

I did not say why to myself at the moment when she told me or
even the next day when we stood on the cement platform and
waited for the train, or even when I stood there alone and watched

458

the last smudge of smoke fade to the west. Nor did I say why to my.
self when I sat alone that night in the house which had been Judge
Irwin’s house but which was now mine. I had closed up my mother’s
house that afternoon, had put the key under the mat on the gallery,
and had left it for good.

Judge Irwin’s house had the odor of dust and disuse and close air.
In the afternoon I opened all the windows and left them open whOe
I went down to the Landing for some supper. When I got back and
turned the lights on, it seemed more like the house which I remem-
bered from all the years. But sitting there in the study, with the
damp, sweet-heavy night air coming in through the windows, I did
not say to myself why I now felt so fully at peace with myself. I
thought of my mother and I felt the peace and the relief and the
new sense of the world.

After a while I got up and walked out of the house and down the
Row. It was a very calm, clear night with scarcely a sibilance from
the water on the shingle of the beach, and the bay was bright under
the stars. I walked down the Row until I came to the Stanton house.
There was a light on in the little back sitting room, a dim light as
though from a reading lamp. I looked at the house for a couple of
minutes and then entered the gate and walked up the path.

The screen door of the gallery was latched. But the main door of
the hall inside the gallery was open, and looking across the gallery
I could see down tlie hall to the place where a rectangle of light was
laid on the floor from the open door of the back sitting room. I
knocked on the frame of tire screen door and waited.

In a moment Anne Stanton appeared in the patch of light down
the hall.

“Who is it?’’ she called.

“It’s me,” I called back.

She came down the hall and across the gallery toward me. Then
she was at the door, a thin, white-clad figure in the dimness beyond
the screen. I started to say hello, but didn’t. And she did not speak,
either, as she fumbled with the latch. Then the door was open and
I stepped inside.

As I stood there, I caught the trace of the scent she used, and a
c<tld hand compressed my heart,

“I didn’t know you’d let me in,” I said, trying to make it sound
like a joke and trying to see her face in the shadow. I could only
see the paleness in shadow and the gleam of her eyes.

“Of course I’d let you in,” she said.

“Well, I didn’t know,” I said, and gave a kind of laugh.

“Why?”

459

“OjEi, the way IVe behaved,”

We moved over to the swing on the gallery and sat down. The
chains creaked, but we sat so still that the thing did not sway a
hair’s breadth,

”What have you done?” she asked.

I fished for a cigarette, found one, and lighted it, I flicked the
match out without looking at her face. “What have I done?” I re-
peated. “Well, it’s what I didn’t do, I didn't answer your letter.”

“That's all right,” she said. Then added reflectively, as though to
herself, “That was a long time ago.”

“It was a long time back, six months, seven months. But I did
worse than not answering it,” I said. “I didn’t even read it. I just
set it up on my bureau and never even opened it.”

She didn’t say anything to that. I took a few drags on the cigarette
and waited but there wasn’t a word.

“It came at the wrong time,” I said finally. “It came at a time
when everything and everybody—even Anne Stanton— looked just
alike to me and I didn’t give a damn. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Like hell you do,” I said,

“Maybe I do,” she said quietly.

“Not the way I mean. You couldn’t.”

“Maybe.”

“Weil, anyway that was the way it was. Everything and every-
body looked alike. I didn’t even feel sorry for anybody. I didn’t even
feel sorry for myself.”

“I never asked you to feel sorry for me,” she said fiercely. “In the
letter or anywhere else.”

“No,” I said slowly, “I don’t reckon you did.”

“I never asked you that.”

“I know,” I said, and fell silent for a moment. Then said: “I
came up here to tell you I don’t feel that way any more. I had to
tell somebody— I had to say it out loud— to be sure it’s true. But it
is true.”

I waited in the silence, which remained unbroken until I began
again.

“It’s my mother,” I said. “You know,” I said, “how it always was
with us. How we didn’t get along. How I thought that she—”

“Don’t!” Anne burst out. “Don’tl I don’t want to hear you talk
that way. What makes you so bitter? What do you talk that way for?
Your mother, Jack, and that poor old man your father!”

“He’s not my father,” I said.

“Not your father!”

460

“No/’ I said, and sitting there in the motionless swing on the
dark gallery, I told her "what there was to tell about the pale-haired
and famish-cheeked girl who had come dowm from Arkansas, and
tried to tell her what my mother had finally given back to me. I
tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden
there was no future, for without one there cannot be die other, and
how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for
only out of the past can you make the future.

I tried to tell her that.

Then, after a long silence, she said, “I believe that, for if I had
not come to believe it I could not have lived.’*

We did not talk any more. I smoked another half a pack of ciga-
rettes, sitting there m the swing in the dark with the summer air
heavy and damp and almost sick-sweet around us, and trying to
catch the sound of her breath in the silence. Then after a long time
I said good night, and ivent down the Row to my father’s house.

This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too.
For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world
and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it
looked another and very different way. The change did not happen
all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know
when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not.
There was, in fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody
had any responsibility for anything and there %vas no god but the
Great Twitch.

At first that thought was horrible to him when it was forced on
him by what seemed the accident of circumstance, for it seemed to
rob him of a memory by which, unconsciously, he had lived; but
then a little later it gave him a sort of satisfaction, because it meant
that he could not be called guilty of anything, not even of having
squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having
delivered his two friends into each other’s hands and death.

But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover that
he did not believe in the Great Twitch any more. He did not be-
lieve in it because he had seen too many people live and die. He
had seen Lucy Stark and Sugar-Boy and the Scholarly Attorney and
Sadie Burke and Anne Stanton live and the ways of their living had
nothing to do with the Great Twitch. He had seen his father die.
He had seen his friend Adam Stanton die. He had seen his friend
Willie Stark die, and had heard him say with his last breath,
might have been all different, Jack. You got to believe that/^

He had seen his two friends, Willie Stark and Adam Stanton, live

461

and die. Each had killed the other. Each had been the doom of the
other. As a student of history, Jack Burden could see that Adam
Stanton, whom he came to call the man of idea, and Willie Stark,
whom he came to call the man of fact, were doomed to destroy each
other, just as each was doomed to try to use the other and to yearn
toward and try to become the other, because each was incomplete
with the terrible division of their age. But at the same time Jack
Burden came to see that his friends had been doomed, he saw that
though doomed they had nothing to do with any doom under the
godhead of the Great Twitch. They were doomed, but they lived in
the agony of will. As Hugh Miller (once Attorney General under
Willie Stark and much later Jack Burden’s friend) said to him
when they were discussing the theory of the moral neutrality of his-
tory: “History is blind, but man is not.” (It looks as though Hugh
will get back into politics, and when he does I’ll be along to hold
his coat I’ve had some valuable experience in that line.)

So now I, Jack Burden, live in my father’s house. In one sense it
is strange that I should be here, for die discovery of truth had one
time robbed me of the past and had killed my father. But in the
end the truth gave the past back to me. So I live in the house which
my father left me. With me is my wife, Anne Stanton, and the old
man who was once married to my mother. When a few months ago
I found him sick in the room above the Mexican restaurant, what
could I do but bring him here.^ (Does he think that I am his son? I
cannot be sure. Nor can I feel that it matters, for each of us is the
son of a million fathers.)

He is very feeble. Now and then he has the strength to play a
game of chess, as he used to play with his friend Montague Irwin
long ago in the long room in the white house by the sea. He used
to be a very good chess player, but now his attention wanders. Or
on good days now he sits in the sunshine. He can read his Bible a
little. He is not strong enough to write any more, but occasionally
he dictates something to me or Anne for a tract which he is writing.

Yesterday he dictated this to me:

The creation of man whom God in His foreknowledge knew doomed to
sin was the awful index of God's omnipotence. For it would have been a
thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere per-
fection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension.
Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create,
man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from
God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s

462

glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be
the index of man’s glory and power. But by God’s help. By His help and
in His -wisdom. ^

He turned to me when he had spoken the last word, stared at me,
and then said, “Did you put that down?’"

“Yes,’' I replied.

Staring at me, he said with sudden violence, “It is true. I know
it is true. Do you know it?”

I nodded my head and said yes, (I did so to keep his mind un-
troubled, but later I was not certain but that in my own way I did
believe what he had said.)

He kept on looking at me, after I had spoken, then said quietly,
“Since that thought came into my mind my soul has been still I
have had it in my mind for tliree days. I have held it there to be
sure by the test of my soul before I spoke it.”

He will never finish the tract. His strength fails visibly from day
to day. The doctor says he will not last the winter.

By the time he is dead I shall be ready to leave the house. For
one thing, the house is heavily mortgaged. Judge Irwdn's affairs, at
the time of his death, were tangled, and in the end it developed diat
he was not rich but poor. Once before, almost tw^enty-five years be-
fore, it had been heavily mortgaged. But then it had been saved by
a crime. A good man had committed a crime to save it, I should not
be too complacent because I am not prepared to commit a crime to
save the house. Perhaps my unwillingness to commit a crime to save
the house (assuming that I should have the opportunity— w^hich is
doubtful) is simply a way of saying that I do not love the house as
much as Judge Irwin loved it and a man’s virtue may be but the
defect of his desire, as his crime may be but a function of his virtue.

Nor should I be complacent because I tried to make amends, in a
way, for a crime which my father had committed. What little money
did come to me from my father's estate should go, I thought, to Miss
Littlepaugh in her foul, fox-smelling room in Memphis. So I went
to Memphis. But T found that she was dead. So I was denied that
inexpensive satisfaction in virtue. I should have to get whatever
satisfaction I was to get in a more expensive way.

But I still had the money, and so I am spending it to live on
while I write the book I began years ago, the life of Cass Mastern,
whom once I could not understand but whom, perhaps, I now may
come to understand. I suppose that there is some humor in the fact
that while I write about Cass Mastern I live in the house of Judge
Irwin and eat bread bought with his money. For Judge Irwin and

463

Cass Mastern do not resemble each other very closely. (If Judge
Irwin resembles any Mastern it is Gilbert, the granite-headed
brother of Cass.) But I do not find the humor in this situation very
funny. The situation is too much like the world in which we live
from birth to death, and the humor of it grows stale from repeti-
tion. Besides, Judge Irwin was my father and he was good to me
and, in a way, he was a man and I loved him.

When the old man is dead and the book is finished, I shall let
the First and Third National Bank take the house and I don’t care
who lives here afterward, for from that day it will be nothing to me
but a well-arranged pile of brick and lumber. Anne and I shall never
live here again, not in the house or at the Landing. (She doesn’t
want to live here any more than I do. She has let her place go to the
Children’s Home she was interested in and I imagine it will become
a kind of sanatorium. She’s not very complacent about having done
that. With Adam dead the place was not a joy but a torture to her,
and the gift of the house was finally her gift to the ghost of Adam,
a poor gift humbly offered, like the handful of wheat or a painted pot
in the tomb, to comfort the ghost and send it on its way so that it
would trouble the living no longer.)

So by summer of this year, 1939, we shall have left Burden’s
Landing.

We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch
young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and
walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently
in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on
the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among
the trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from
now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the
convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful
responsibility of "X'ime.

The End

464

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